OUR STRATEGY

Our strategy is to become a leading, multi-product pharmaceutical company by developing additional innovative nitric oxide products and by building on our BiDil development experience and commercialization infrastructure to identify and market additional products for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases for black patients. Key elements of our strategy include:

Successfully commercializing BiDil. We have developed an internal marketing and sales infrastructure to promote BiDil for the treatment of heart failure in black patients. Based on the number of physicians serving the black heart failure market, we believe we will successfully promote BiDil with approximately 175 to 200 sales representatives. Because BiDil is the only heart failure treatment specifically indicated to treat black patients with heart failure, we believe that we will capture significant market share in this population.

Successfully leveraging our BiDil sales force. Our sales force will target high prescribing physicians who treat black patients with cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. We believe the black community is an underserved patient population and suffers a disproportionate incidence of cardiovascular and other diseases. We believe that we can in-license or otherwise acquire rights to drugs and drug candidates to serve this population.

Capitalizing on our clinical development expertise. We believe the experience we gained in designing and executing our BiDil clinical trial program makes us an attractive clinical development partner for companies developing product candidates in the cardiovascular field.

Focusing our internal development projects and corporate collaborations on nitric oxide-enhancing versions of existing medicines. We believe that many pharmaceutical companies have currently marketed drugs and products that can benefit from the therapeutic attributes and the potential patent protection of our nitric oxide-enhancing technology. We are currently conducting research and development on several drug classes and have consolidated an intellectual property position from which we believe we can generate significant value. We intend to continue to enter into collaborations with leading health care companies where our product candidates will benefit from the marketing reach, clinical expertise and technology of the partner. Our research and development collaborations with Boston Scientific for drug-coated stents and with Merck for COX-2 inhibitors are examples of our ability to enter into collaborations with leading companies.

Continuing to protect and enhance our product-specific and nitric oxide intellectual property rights and capabilities. Because of its critical role in our on-going product development efforts, we intend to rigorously pursue the protection of our intellectual property. In order to protect and expand our current intellectual property position, we intend to invest significantly in nitric oxide-related research and development efforts, including attracting and retaining highly talented and experienced personnel.