Going for the Gold

After years of research, Dendreon is finally ready to release its first therapy... and it may be a blockbuster.

By Sally James | February 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Photograph by Hayley Young

You don't have to know biotech
executive Mitchell Gold well for him to tell you about his mother's death from
breast cancer. She died when he was just five years old.

The chief executive of
Dendreon, a Seattle company poised to market a new therapy for prostate cancer,
would rather talk about patients than profit. He points to his mother's death
as fueling his passion to find new treatments for cancer, and he believes that
passion is shared by many of the roughly 400 employees of this research company
headquartered near Seattle's waterfront sculpture park. Approval of the
product, Provenge, by the Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to come by
May 1.

Investors in the company,
unlike Gold, do want to talk profits, and expect big numbers from Provenge, a
revolutionary treatment for prostate cancer that some call a vaccine and one
doctor labels a "game-changer." It harnesses the body's own immune system to
help fight the cancer, and reportedly has few side effects. Yearly sales in the
United States are projected to reach $1 billion. The company won't comment on
the sticker price Provenge will carry when it debuts.

Investors took the company's
stock from near $3 a share to nearly $30 a share during 2009. The company estimates
about 103,000 men in the United States could be recipients of this new therapy.
Gold says the company will market exclusively within the United States, but
hopes to partner with someone else for European and global sales.

"[Chief Financial Officer Gregory]
Schiffman did a fabulous job to position the company to go to market," says
David Miller, president of Biotech Stock Research LLC, an analysis firm in
Seattle.

To ramp up in advance of the
launch, Dendreon expects to hire about 200 new employees in sales and
administration. While some will be in one of the company's three leased
buildings in Seattle, many of the new hires will join existing employees at its
Morris Plains, N.J., manufacturing center and laboratory. Two other lab sites,
in Atlanta and Orange County, Calif., are set to be built and ramped up to
begin making Provenge in 2011, if all goes as planned. The company sold 15
million new shares of stock in December, raising $409 million to build the
plants and support other operational costs.

Dendreon hopes to more than
double the size of its Seattle headquarters, according to Schiffman. It leases
about 95,000 square feet now, but intends to move to a space of about 250,000
square feet in the South Lake Union area.

Both Gold and David