Cancer Vaccine Maker Can't Meet Demand

Dendreon Corp. raised more than $400 million in a secondary offering last December to build factories so it could produce enough of its prostate cancer vaccine. At the time, the product wasn't even approved. Now that the vaccine Provenge is being sold, the company can't keep up with demand.

Seattle-based Dendreon can make only enough vaccine to treat about 2 percent of eligible patients until manufacturing ramps up next year, Dendreon Chief Operating Officer Hans Bishop tells Bloomberg News.

Dendreon is making enough vaccine to treat 2,000 patients in its first year, well short of the 100,000 eligible to take it. The company is making Provenge in a New Jersey factory now but plans to have plants up and running in Atlanta and near Los Angeles by late next year.

Approved in April, Provenge is the first vaccine to treat prostate cancer. It works differently than other treatments, using the body's own immune system to attack the cancer. One of the appealing selling points about Provenge for a number of men is that it doesn't have the side effects common in some existing treatments, including impotence and incontinence.

Some analysts see the product reaching blockbuster status, topping more than $1 billion in the next few years. But the manufacturing issues are creating the first shortage of a new cancer drug since 1992 when Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. couldn't keep up with demand for Taxol, Bloomberg says.