Company: Gilead Sciences ($GILD)
Based: Foster City, CA
R&D budget: $1.07B (€789M)
Change from 2009: +15.9%
Net sales spent on R&D: 13.3%

This past October was a big month for Gilead Sciences, a leading marketer of HIV drugs.

In the space of just a few weeks, Gilead not only began construction on a new research complex that will house a workforce expected to double to 3,400 in Foster City, CA, in coming years, but it also filed for European approval for its combo therapy Quad. When the building work is completed, Gilead will have a home encompassing a sprawling 755,048 square feet of office space and some 445,432 square feet for laboratories, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

Gilead has already had regulatory success this year with Complera, but analysts see Quad as a much better contender for blockbuster status, capable of helping a broad range of patients with a wide variety of viral loads to contend with. Anxious to find out, Gilead has revved up its regulatory strategy and is shooting for an approval in mid-2012.

Gilead is out to find a better replacement for products that have built the company. Atripla advanced the standard of care in the field, but it has also been linked to some severe neurological side effects, which include nightmares and hallucinations.

Gilead's boosting agent, cobicistat, is one of the four ingredients in Quad. It proved very attractive to Bristol-Myers Squibb, which will use it in combination with protease inhibitor Reyataz. Gilead also recently partnered with GlobeImmune on a new hepatitis B treatment that will include Viread.