“I haven’t seen something this left for dead and abandoned honestly in my career,” said Nodelman, whose fund has amassed a roughly 5% stake in Galapagos, according to the company’s most recent disclosures. “If I said to someone, ‘Here’s this new opportunity: The company has $4.5 billion in cash. The CEO is Paul, who has brought over 25 new drugs to market and is one of the premier drug hunters alive today, and you get to invest at a negative $2 billion valuation,’ people would just laugh.”
U.S. biotech giant Gilead Sciences is making the same wager. Most of Galapagos’ enviable bankroll came from Gilead in a handsome partnership deal that hasn’t exactly aged well, giving the company a stake in its Belgian counterpart’s reboot.
“We have somebody I would definitely put a bet behind, Paul Stoffels, now running that,” Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day said at the STAT Breakthrough Summit earlier this month. “Paul happens to have a bit of a track record of innovation,” he said, grinning at his own understatement.
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Every conversation about Galapagos comes back to Stoffels. He has a blank slate, a lot of money, and a claim to the industry’s most expansive Rolodex. One year into his tenure as CEO, he has heard innumerable variations of the question, “What are you going to buy?” And he has, characteristically, a professorial answer.
“Excel sheets don’t drive our business,” Stoffels said. “I learned, in my long career in pharma, it’s not the biggest number that makes the biggest return; it’s the smartest selection of products that makes the biggest return.”
Before Stoffels was Galapagos’ CEO, he was its neighbor. In 1995, the hotspot for Belgian biotech was Mechelen, halfway between Brussels and Antwerp, where a single street was home to Tibotec, a firm developing drugs for HIV, and Virco, a startup at work on viral diagnostics. Stoffels had left a leadership role at nearby Janssen Pharmaceutica, already a J&J subsidiary, to work with both startups at once, serving as chairman of Tibotec and CEO of Virco.