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Company Interview Excerpt
Ligand Pharmaceuticals Inc. - John L. Higgins


Full article published: 04/05/2010


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TWST: Please give us a summary of Ligand's history and tell us what the company does.
Mr. Higgins: We were founded just over two decades ago as a drug discovery company. Through the years, we've had very good success at discovering drugs. Notably, five drugs in particular were discovered in our labs or with our partners, that have made it all the way through development to regulatory approval. Three are on the market today and two are pending launch. In addition, we've done 15 licensing deals since our inception, further validating our research credentials. This heritage underscores how productive our research has been. We have great research tools, scientists and decision-making when it comes to drug research. That's the core of Ligand today. Through the years, we ventured into sales and marketing, selling a few of our own drugs that we discovered, notably cancer drugs, and we also had a pain product. And we went beyond drug discovery into late-stage clinical development, having run numerous large trials. But that business at the time was not successful for us. Several years ago, we decided to divest our commercial assets - our marketed products and sales force - and get back to what we are good at, and that is drug research. The last three years we have been through a major rebuilding and restructuring period, where we returned to our core research business, focusing our efforts with a strategy to drive value through building a vast portfolio of partnerships and licensing deals with pharmaceutical companies. Despite a brutal financial market, we have come through the last three years very well, as a highly focused and streamlined company with a clear business strategy. In addition, during that period we also had an opportunity to do some very creative acquisitions of other public biotech companies, companies who had good assets but were severely struggling. Specifically we've done three acquisitions in the last 15 months that have substantially expanded our pipeline and our roster of pharmaceutical partnerships.

 

Tickers included in this excerpt: LGND

 

For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.