Patients

We are engaged: Our commitment to developing transformational medicines For Patients, With Patients and the healthcare community

At Galapagos, our therapeutic programs are driven by patients’ needs, designed to pioneer best-in-disease therapeutics, and developed through active engagement with patients and the healthcare community.

Since our founding, we have valued pioneering approaches to advancing transformational medicines for diseases with significant unmet medical needs. Our commitment to improving the lives of people worldwide is reflected from our innovative research to our product development and providing patient access to our innovative medicines.

That is why we value continued improvement in our research, development, and access approaches, in an unwavering focus on outcomes with the greatest value to patients. It is why we embrace change and support disruptive innovation, aim to build a culture of responsible innovation throughout the entire medicine lifecycle and are committed to enable the safe and appropriate use of our medicines as they are prescribed by physicians and used by patients in the medical practice.

We focus our development efforts on areas where we have deep expertise and map out the critical path towards market with the goal of reducing the time it takes to bring new medicines to the patients who need them.

At every stage of the patient journey, we aim to pioneer for patients by working in close partnership with patients and patient organizations, starting with the design of our clinical studies.

We therefore co-developed our Patient Partnership Charter in 2021 with the patient community to set our commitment to engage with patients. Using the Charter as a guideline we defined our roadmap to:

• strengthen our relationships with academia, patient groups, and industry partners;
• include patient and investigational site expectations into the design of late phase clinical trials with the aim of making participation easier and more rewarding:
• identify measurable performance indicators; and
• assess our performance during clinical development as well as after.

We believe our research and development efforts can help advance science beyond the patients we serve. Our plain language summaries of our data make them easily understandable, and our commitment to our Open Access publishing enables us to communicate clearly and effectively to all our stakeholders.

Furthermore, since 2020, we actively participate as a member in the Open Pharma initiative, a first-ever collaborative, multi-sponsor, non-profit project. We believe that publications are the route to credible, compliant pharma communications. Open Pharma’s long-term goal is to secure the same terms for authors who publish company-funded research as those for authors who publish research funded through other means. As such, all research findings are freely available to read and reuse, from the date of publication.

Actions 2022

• We set-up the Galapagos Patient Engagement Council as a consultative body, advising Galapagos on patient engagement-related topics, and as a knowledge exchange platform between Galapagos and the patient community
• We embedded the health literacy principles in our key documents for clinical trial participants
• We published plain language summaries in Galapagos driven scientific manuscripts disclosing data from clinical-stage trials