LGND

Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated

A biopharmaceutical company that licenses drug technologies and collects royalties on medicines its partners develop and sell. Its best-known asset is Captisol, a sugar-based "cage" that wraps around hard-to-dissolve drugs to make them stable and deliverable. Founded in 1987 as Progenx, Inc., it was renamed Ligand Pharmaceuticals in 1989 after the biochemistry term for a molecule that binds to a receptor — a nod to its original focus on receptor biology.