Ex-Dendreon Corporation CEO Gold Working On New Cancer Drug Startups

October 13, 2014

By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

In a recent piece today by Xconomy, former Dendreon CEO Mitch Gold discussed his new life science startup projects. Perhaps best known for backing Dendreon in its efforts to get FDA approval for its prostate cancer drug Provenge (sipuleucel-T) in 2010, Gold later founded Alpine Biosciences. In 2013 he then started a Seattle-based biotech hedge fund, AlpineBioVentures. Only a matter of months later he sold AlpineBiosciences (not to be confused with Alpine BioVentures )to Oncothyreon for $27 million in an all-stock deal valued at 10 percent of Oncothyreon.

Alpine BioVentures has raised over $2 billion in healthcare capital markets. “Our number one, I think, strategic asset we have in the fund is being able to identify good science early,” said Gold in the Xconomy article. “I think we have the ability to see stuff coming before other people do. If we can continue to do that, the fund is going to be successful, both in creating companies and investing in new entities.”

Gold indicates he and BioVentures are looking at companies and potential products similar to Dendreon’s sipuleucel-T. One of the controversies, and possibly one of the reasons why Provenge and Dendreon were not as successful as expected was the $93,000 per patient price tag Dendreon slapped on the drug. Analysts at the time expected a price of approximately $62,000. The company in 2011 had projected $350 to $400 million in sales of Provenge, but ended up with $49.6 million in sales in the end of Q2 of that year. According to analysts at the time, the reason for the dismal returns was the pricing and uncertainty as to whether physicians would get reimbursed for the high-priced drug.

In a 2011 Xconomy article, Luke Timmerman wrote, “But there was a major downside to being that aggressive on price. had spent years roiled in controversy about how convincing its clinical trial data were. Not even an FDA approval silenced the doubters…. Sure enough, three months after FDA approval, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services opened up an unusual process known as a national coverage analysis, in which it sought to review whether it ought to reimburse doctors for this new treatment, and if so, under what circumstances.”

But Gold moved on and Alpine BioVentures is interested in companies that are working with siRNA drug delivery systems and two startups that focus on cancer and immunotherapy. Gold declined to comment on the companies, however, saying, “We’ll probably keep those in stealth mode for a little bit.”