Free Republic

Dendreon Corp filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after sales of the world's first cancer vaccine fell short of expectations and left the company deep in debt. More than two-thirds of the company's market value was wiped out in early trading on Monday. Seattle-based Dendreon said it had agreed terms of a financial restructuring with certain bond holders that may involve a standalone recapitalization or the sale of the company or its assets. After its approval by U.S. regulators in 2010, hopes were high that Provenge, Dendreon's only drug on the market, would become a blockbuster. But adoption of the...

What follows is part 1 of a 15-part series. The remaining installments will appear on Deep Capture over the next several weeks, after which point the story will be published in its entirety. It is a story about the travails of just one small company, but it describes market machinations that have affected hundreds of other companies, and it contains a larger message for anyone concerned about the “deep capture” of our nation’s media and regulatory bodies. * * * * * * * * This story, like too many others, begins with Jim Cramer, the CNBC personality, making “a...

An experimental treatment tripled the survival rate of men with advanced prostate cancer in a clinical trial, doctors said yesterday, a result they said represents perhaps the first significant success for therapies known as cancer vaccines. The treatment, developed by Dendreon, a Seattle biotechnology company, is called a vaccine not because it prevents disease but because it tries to harness the body's own immune system to fight cancer after the disease has developed. Many such cancer vaccines have failed in clinical trials and none have reached the market in the United States. But Dendreon's treatment, called Provenge, now seems to...