Updates - Dendreon and Elan

Well, I am going to cheat and basically cut & paste an email I just sent to a few folks:

Dendreon:

Here we go!! We’ll know the final results by the 28th at the latest. We’re at $6.30 now and it’ll be:
a repeat of 2007, going to $20 or so (on a statistically significant results)
bouncing around between $4 and $10 (if the results are very close to stat sig – they’ve indicated they will refile anyways, if this happens)
drop to $1 or so (if a large miss). I do not see this happening at all because 6 months ago the interim already showed a 20% reduction of risk of death from the drug – and they only need a 22% reduction at the final.

I personally think it’ll be a pretty good result. If we see $20+, you may want to sell half of what you have and let the rest stay for approval.


Elan:

Earnings call are coming up -- BIIB on the 16th and Elan on the 22nd. So we'll know Tysabri numbers. Last known is 37,100 worldwide at the end of 2008. I am actually unsure if this includes the 600 in trials or if it's only commercial? I suspect it is total, as all other reports show it that way.

IF we return to close to 200/week net adds, this would be about 2,400 new patients and put us just shy of 40K. So I view anything north of 40K as pretty spectacular. One thing to keep in mind is that the EU is pretty fragmented and each county has to approve Tysabri and the insurance costs individually. So uptake is slower but starts gathering steam a few quarters after each country finally approves it. We're close to snowballing territory, I think ... may be 1 or 2 more quarters though.

AAB-001 - probably no news. More details of how they are approaching the 2 mg dose of non-carriers that they dropped, but that is just noise. I don't expect anything until end of this year, IF they take an interim and it's good. Still remotely possible that they file a BLA at the end of the year based on the non-carrier phase II results and 6-9 months safety data from the III. I doubt this now, as the dropped 2 mg group was because of vascular edema. Too much safety noise and the 2.0 mg group taken out would be post-hoc. Bummer!

Sale of the company? Partial sale? I don't think they'd release that at an earnings call. I unfortunately still think we'll see a buyout before years end simply because the market cap is too attractive.

I bought more last week at $5.67. It may bounce around but I don’t think it’ll go lower than $4, and I think we’ll start seeing it go up again IF Tysabri numbers start increasing at an increasing rate again (which I view as likely).

Regards,
Trond