spp complete and capital secured., page-14

Hi dcheckers
Regarding Dendreon, there's a raft of reasons for the recent conjecture about their future.

First is their massive debt problem, with convertible notes due in 2014 and 2016. Their current debt load is greater than the company's market cap.

Secondly, their 1st Q sales fell well short of analyst expectations. It appears their strategy of marketing Provenge directly is not achieving the penetration they'd hoped. I'll bet they now wish they'd JV'd the marketing with a big pharma.

Thirdly, two new prostate cancer chemo drugs hit the market about 6 months ago which are grabbing market share. DNDN are now scrambling a trial to show efficacy improvement of Provenge in combination with them.

Lastly, their production costs are not coming down anywhere near as quickly as they'd hoped. Their problem is that each dose of Provenge to be administered to patients has to be produced individually. That means for a course of treatment, the entire process has to be replicated 3-5 times. Cvac produces the entire course of vaccine injections in one go and is kept frozen until each dose is administered. Effectively that means 1/3rd the cost of production.

I know ML is keenly aware of the issues and mistakes DNDN had made and now faces. He seems pretty determined to avoid their pitfalls, hence the insistence on keeping the balance sheet healthy.

Someone earlier asked about the cost of the other cancer indication trials for Cvac. There was a mention in the Entitlement Offer letter, that the most recent Saxony bank grant represented roughly 50% of the cost of the new Phase 2 trials.