About Ardea Biosciences

San Diego, California-based Ardea Biosciences, Inc. (formerly IntraBiotics Pharmaceuticals, Inc.) 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, hired a new senior management team and changed our name from IntraBiotics Pharmaceuticals, Inc. to Ardea Biosciences, Inc.

Our Business Strategy

We are focused on the discovery and development of small-molecule therapeutics for the treatment of viral diseases, cancer and inflammatory diseases. We plan to source these development 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 these disease areas.

Our approach relies on the FAST-follower strategy:

First to market drugs are rarely the “best-in-class,” because in order to be first, innovators     usually have to sacrifice quality for speed,
Assess the innovator’s patents and published literature to expedite drug discovery efforts,
Select validated targets, for large patient populations with significant unmet medical needs,   that are amenable to structure-based drug design discovery efforts and early clinical
  proof-of-concept, and
Target a profile that should result in "best-in-class" and patent-protected molecules.

Our proprietary drug development pipeline, based on a fully-integrated discovery, research and development platform, is focused on clinical candidates that are designed to block important target proteins required for the replication of viruses, such as HIV/AIDS, and the proliferation or regulation of tumors or the immune system. We have core expertise in structure-based drug design and significant expertise in drug development. Our most advanced development programs are two distinct classes of non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) for the treatment of HIV/AIDS and a series of compounds that are specific inhibitors of mitogen-activated ERK kinase (or MEK) for the treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases.