Pharmaceutical Partners

Isis has a strong history of establishing corporate partnerships with pharmaceutical industry leaders. These collaborations provide funding to advance our antisense drug discovery efforts and clinical development programs, and to continuously enhance our technologies. We license our drugs to pharmaceutical partners for further development and commercialization and these partnerships benefit us, our drugs and our partners. Our partners have resources and experience guiding drug development and our drugs should advance more rapidly with increased access to larger markets than if we developed them on our own.

In 2008, we licensed our leading cardiovascular drug, mipomersen, to Genzyme Corporation as part of a strategic transaction that included $325 million in an upfront license fee and equity investment with the potential to earn over $1.5 billion in potential commercial and developmental milestone payments, and a mipomersen profit sharing arrangement, which will enable us to continue to benefit from mipomersen's success.

This transaction reflects our strategy to place our drugs in the hands of partners for further development and commercialization while we benefit initially with an upfront license fee, during development with milestone payments and ultimately during commercial success with royalty or profit sharing arrangements.