We believe our experience in registering and commercializing highly differentiated specialty products will enable us to build these products into a successful respiratory and cardiopulmonary portfolio – and provide a foundation for near- and long-term growth as we continue to look for additional opportunities to broaden this franchise and augment our existing pipeline.
With small molecule therapeutics constituting a significant portion of our development efforts, in November we made the decision to acquire Raylo Chemicals Inc. and most of its assets from Germany-based, specialty chemicals company Degussa AG. For more than 17 years, Raylo generated the raw materials and manufactured the active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) for several of our antiviral compounds. Our new Edmonton, Alberta site will help ensure clinical and commercial API supplies to support our ongoing small molecule development programs and will assist in chemical development activities to improve existing commercial manufacturing processes.
We completed the acquisitions of Corus and Myogen in the second half of 2006 – and welcomed their employees to the team at Gilead. These companies possessed late-stage clinical drug candidates that demonstrated the potential to address significant unmet medical needs in the treatment of respiratory and cardiopulmonary diseases.
With the acquisition of Corus in August, we gained a Phase III drug candidate, aztreonam lysine for inhalation, for the potential treatment of cystic fibrosis-related lung infections. Our acquisition of Myogen in November added two promising drug candidates to our development portfolio, ambrisentan for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension and darusentan for the treatment of resistant hypertension. Ambrisentan is currently under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additionally, as part of the Myogen acquisition, we gained a commercial therapeutic, Flolan, which is indicated for the long-term intravenous treatment of primary pulmonary hypertension. Through Myogen’s existing agreement with GlaxoSmithKline Inc. (GSK), we gained the rights to market and distribute Flolan in the United States.
