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Likely Last Drug From Ardea Biosciences Approved for Sale

Ardea Biosciences, the local biotech now owned by AstraZeneca, got the green light from regulators to sell a new drug developed in San Diego labs. It’s the second medicine to make it from Ardea’s labs to the market, and will likely be the last.

The drug is called Duzallo, and it’s meant to treat a symptom of gout called hyperuricemia, or excessive uric acid in the blood. Specifically, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Duzallo to be used in cases where the patient is not responding to allopurinol, the standard treatment for this condition.

The new medicine will be commercialized in the U.S. by Cambridge-based Ironwood Pharmaceuticals and will be commercially available early in the fourth quarter of 2017, said the company’s president and CEO James Mackay in an email.

Although Ardea has been busy in San Diego since its founding in the 1990s, the company’s local presence is winding to a close. The company was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2012 for $1.26 billion, partly due to the promise of its lead drug at the time, Zurampic. Zurampic was approved in December 2015, and AstraZeneca promptly sold rights to the drug to Ironwood in 2016.

AstraZeneca told the Business Journal last year that the global firm was sharpening its focus in three main therapy areas, and gout didn’t fit in the picture. As a result, Ardea would be laying off 145 employees and closing its San Diego office by 2018. The Employment Development Department, however, reported total layoffs of 193 employees.

Mackay said the local office is slated to close March 31 2018.

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