Good afternoon. My name is Christie and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Ligand's second quarter 2009 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) I will now turn the call over to Erika Luib, with Investor Relations.

Thanks, Christie. Welcome to Ligand's second quarter financial results and business update conference call. Speaking today for Ligand are John Higgins, President and CEO; and John Sharp, Vice President of Finance and CFO. Just a reminder to everyone that today's call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Federal Securities laws, these may include but are not limited to statements regarding intent, belief or current expectations of the Company, its internal and partnered programs, and its management. These statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual events or results may differ materially from the projections described in today's second quarter press release and this conference call. Additional information concerning risk factors and other matters concerning Ligand can be found in Ligand's public periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available at www.sec.gov. The information in this conference call related to projections or other forward-looking statements represents the Company’s best judgment as of today, August 3, 2009. Ligand undertakes no obligation to revise or update any statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this conference call. At this time, I will turn the conference call over to John Higgins. John?

Thank you, Erika, and thank you for joining our call this afternoon. Here, we are in the middle of the summer and the middle of 2009, Ligand had a productive past few months and we are pleased to be on the call here to update you on our developments. The last few months have been marked by positive clinical and regulatory events, advances on our research programs and a number of other developments with our corporate partners. Overall Ligand is focused on strong financial management with the goal to drive value for the shareholders through collaborations with pharmaceutical companies and progress on our own pipeline. In this quarter, our revenues increased nicely while we continued to focus on reducing expenses. We saw the third product that we contributed to the discovery of, get approval by one of our partners. We initiated human trials for another promising drug we discovered and we entered into a new license agreement that may generate future royalties for us. Going to a little more detail as far as the clinical development, two partners announced new Phase 3 data. Wyeth announced that data from a Phase 3 clinical trial for APRELA, which is bazedoxifene with PREMARIN were published in the journal Fertility and Sterility. The APRELA significantly reduced the frequency and the severity of hot flushes and improved measures of vaginal atrophy when compared to placebo. Wyeth expects to file an initial NDA for APRELA in the first half of 2010. On the clinical front, GSK announced new data for the RAISE and EXTEND studies in June at the European Hematology Conference in Germany. According to GSK, the data showed that patients treated with PROMACTA experienced significant elevations in platelet counts, as well as reductions in bleeding and bruising compared with placebo. In addition, patients experienced…

Thanks John. I will start by briefly recapping our Q2 financial results that were just released and then provide an update on our outlook for the remainder of this year and as John mentioned provide an early look at 2010 as well. Second quarter of 2009 revenues was $7.6 million compared with $4.8 million for the second quarter of 2008. The increase was due to revenues from collaboration agreements of $4.7 million as well as license and milestone revenues totaling $0.9 million. These increases were partially offset by decline in AVINZA royalty due to the change in our contractual royalty rate from 15% to 5%. Total operating costs and expenses for the second quarter 2009 were $12.7 million compared with $10.9 million for the second quarter of 2008. Research and development expenses in the second quarter were $9.5 million compared with $6.4 million in the second quarter of 2008. The increase of $3.1 million is primarily due to $4.7 million of costs associated with servicing or collaboration agreements, which were partially offset by $0.6 million of reduction in clinical trial cost as we completed our ongoing LGD-4665 clinical trials, and $1 million reduction in consulting and outside service costs associated with our internal research programs. General and administrative expenses in the second quarter of 2009 were $2.8 million compared with $4.6 million in 2008. The decrease of $1.8 million is primarily due to reduced legal expenses as we reached the settlement with Rockefeller University and the SEC concluded this investigation in the first quarter of 2009. Additionally, during the second quarter of 2009, we recorded a $0.4 million write-off of acquired in-process research and development as a result of adjustments related to the purchase price allocation for Pharmacopeia. The loss from continuing operations for the second quarter was $4.5 million…

Thanks John and thanks for the summary. We would like to open the call up for questions, so perhaps the operator can queue in the callers.

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Joe Pantginis - Merriman Curhan Ford.

Just a couple quick questions, obviously the focus is on a lot of your partnered products currently, I am just wondering if you add a little color on any visibility on potential data catalysts surrounding these partnered products and then the follow up question is where are you focusing mainly on your internal programs currently? Thanks a lot.

You bet. Joe thanks, nice to hear your voice on the call. The partnered programs, we have highlighted actually a number of clinical regulatory events this quarter. We think a very good data, particularly out of GSK for their ITP program and Wyeth for APRELA. As far as other important events, while we do not know the timing clearly, we are interested in seeing data coming out of Bristol-Myers Phase 2 program. They have got a p38 program there in psoriasis, arthritis and so on. We have got a Phase 2 stage program partnered up with Schering there in COPD and asthma. Both of those collaborations we brought in with our acquisition of Pharmacopeia, we are monitoring clinical trial of another public sites to try to get a sense of when the trials are fully finished and data might be out. Both partners have communicated to us that they really take a fairly kind of type approach to disclosing data but we do believe that the data from some or all of studies to be forthcoming in the next six to nine months or so. So those are perhaps the more substantive clinical events that we are anticipating in the next several quarters. Specific to PROMACTA, as I alluded in my prepared remarks, GSK continues to make a significant investment and we have seen progress advancing PROMACTA for a number of other indications of this. I think by all accounts are believed to be the much larger indications. There is one Phase 3 ongoing for chronic liver disease. I believe ClinicalTrials.gov suggests that study to be finished or fully enrolled in 2009 and they are also running two Phase 3 trials for hepatitis. Those are longer term studies and many more patients so we may not see data for that,…

(Operator Instructions) We have no further questions.

Okay. Operator, thank you. I appreciate everybody’s attendance and just in summary, I want to thank investors’ support, the research analysts who are covering story. We believe that Ligand is coming together very nicely. Overall, we are excited about our potential sources of revenue. We believe we have done an excellent job, reducing expenses. I think our execution on the operating phases have been exceptional particularly in light of the fact we went through a major restructuring a couple of years ago and recently acquired and brought under our full operating company in Pharmacopeia. We have clearly very high quality partnerships that have continued to deliver positive news flow and internally we have got a number of successes with our own research. We continue to advance our pipeline and we are pleased with the progress we are making in those areas. So, again, we appreciate your support. We will be at a couple of conferences this fall as we get closer to those dates. We will be putting out announcements to let you know when and where we will be and as always we are out on the road every so often and be reaching out to investors for investor meetings as well. So, again, we appreciate your support and appreciate your time here.

This concludes our conference call for today. You may now disconnect your lines.