Ardea, headquartered in San Diego, California, is a biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of small-molecule therapeutics for the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), gout, cancer and inflammatory diseases. Ardea was formerly known as IntraBiotics Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and was incorporated in the State of Delaware in 1994.

On December 21, 2006, we acquired intellectual property and other assets related to three distinct pharmaceutical research and development programs from Valeant Research & Development, Inc., or Valeant, pursuant to an Asset Purchase Agreement.  Since that time, we have successfully advanced all of these programs and expanded beyond them through our own internal research and development efforts to establish our current pipeline of exciting clinical and preclinical stage product candidates.

Our Business Strategy

We plan to continue to generate product candidates from both our internal drug discovery programs and our in-licensing efforts. We believe that we are well-positioned to create shareholder value through our development activities given the ability to achieve clinical proof-of-concept relatively quickly and cost-effectively in the disease areas that we are pursuing.

Our proprietary drug development pipeline, based on a fully-integrated discovery, research and development platform, is focused on product candidates that are designed to block important target proteins required for the replication of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the regulation of uric acid in patients with hyperuricemia and gout, the proliferation of tumors and the regulation of the immune system. We have core expertise in structure-based drug design and significant expertise in drug development. Our most advanced development programs include two distinct classes of non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) for the treatment of HIV, inhibitors of the URAT1 transporter expressed in the kidney, which is responsible for the regulation of uric acid levels and is a validated target for the treatment of hyperuricemia and gout and a series of compounds that are specific inhibitors of mitogen-activated ERK kinase (MEK) for the treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases.