AstraZeneca has agreed to pay $1.3 billion to acquire the San Diego-based biotechnology company Ardea Biosciences. The deal marks AstraZeneca’s biggest acquisition since it paid $15.7 billion dollars for MedImmune in 2007 and is expected to be the first in a series of acquisitions designed to help revamp its lagging pipeline.

The $1.3 billion price-tag, or $32 a share, represents a 54 percent premium to Ardea’s closing share price on Friday, April 20 and gives AstraZeneca rights to Ardea’s lead drug candidate, lesinurad, a late-stage drug currently in development for the treatment of joint inflammation in gout patients. AstraZeneca will also acquire Ardea’s promising next-generation gout and cancer compounds.

The U.K.’s second-biggest drugmaker is currently seeking new products as it rebounds from a series of drug development setbacks, including most recently a rejection by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of dapagliflozin for the treatment of type 2 diabetes.

AstraZeneca is also looking to reinvigorate its pipeline in the wake of looming patent expirations for its two biggest-selling drugs, Nexium for ulcers and the antipsychotic Seroquel. Both drugs, which generated nearly $10.3 billion in combined sales last year, are due to lose patent protection in 2014.

The deal is representative of the type of deals AstraZeneca is planning on making this year, even if it may involve therapeutic areas outside its internal expertise.

AstraZeneca recently signed a risk-sharing collaboration deal to jointly develop and sell five anti-inflammatory drugs currently in Amgen’s pipeline and just last week received good news when the European Medicines Agency recommended the approval of dapagliflozin, which the FDA had earlier rejected.

"We’ve got some very exciting internal programs and at the same time we’ve got to do these kind of deals, and these will be pure relationships, licensing agreements, bolt-on acquisitions, and I expect to be talking about more of these such deals as the year progresses,” Martin Mackay, head of research and development for AstraZeneca told Dow Jones Newswire without naming any potential targets.

Analysts’ projections estimate that, if approved, lesinurad can generate $194 million in sales by 2016. Savient’s already approved Krystexxa is expected to garner sales of $226.5 million in 2016.