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.

In 2010, we formed a “Preferred Partner” alliance worth up to nearly $1.5 billion with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to develop antisense drugs for rare, ocular and infectious diseases. We have earned $38 million in upfront payments from GSK, including $3 million payment related to the initiation of a sixth program. We retain control over the discovery and early development of the drugs while still being eligible to receive milestone payments as we advance these drugs in clinical development. This alliance is a new type of relationship for us and supports our business strategy while also allowing us to work with a very high-quality partner to maximize the value of the drugs in late-stage development and commercialization. We have already moved the first drug from this collaboration into clinical development. With the initiation of the Phase 1 study of ISIS-TTR_Rx, we have earned $10 million in milestrone payments under the collaboration.

These transactions reflect our strategy to place our drugs in the hands of partners for late-stage development and commercialization while we benefit with an upfront license fee, and milestone payments as the drugs are advanced. We also benefit substantially during commercial success with royalty or profit sharing arrangements.