As background to the April 28 AUA medical conference presentation on Provenge (sipuleucal-T) immunology, here’s an audiocast of Dendreon CEO Mitchell Gold talking about their lead product, Provenge, at an investors’ conference, Biotechnology Industry Organization BIO CEO & Investor Conference, February 19, 2009.

To hear the audio click the green button. Your computer media player (Windows Media Player or RealPlayer) will open in your browser. Wait for the audio to load, it takes a minute or two. Runs approx 20 mins.

BIO: Dr. Mitchell H. Gold, age 41, received a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.D. from Rush Medical College. From 1993 to 1998 he was a resident physician in the Department of Urology at the University of Washington. Dr. Gold currently serves on the boards of the University of Washington/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Prostate Cancer Institute and the Washington Biotechnology and BioMedical Association.

From 1995 to April 2000, Dr. Gold was the President and Chief Executive Officer, and a co-founder of Elixis Corporation, a medical information systems company.

From April 2000 to May 2001, he served as Vice President of Business Development and Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Data Critical Corporation, a company engaged in wireless transmission of critical healthcare data, now a division of GE Medical.

Dr. Gold has served as Dendreon’s Chief Executive Officer since January 1, 2003, and as a director since May 2002. He also served as  Vice President of Business Development from June 2001 to May 2002, and as Chief Business Officer from May 2002 through December 2002. He lives in Seattle. WA.

Source: Forbes.

In this presentation Gold mentions a “cassette.” This refers to “Dendreon’s proprietary approach for antigen modification.” The cassette, it is claimed, “allows for the engineering or modification of tumor antigens.” Dendteon claims:

 We engineer antigens to produce proprietary therapeutic vaccines for
multiple cancers as well as other diseases. We designed antigen engineering to
trigger and maximize cell-mediated immunity by augmenting the uptake and
processing of the target antigen by the dendritic cell. We can affect the
quality and quantity of the immune response that is generated by adding,
deleting or modifying selected sequences of the antigen gene, together with
inserting the modified antigen into our Antigen Delivery Cassette.
   Our Antigen Delivery Cassette is a protein that has three regions: the
region that enhances antigen binding and entry into dendritic cells; the region
that directs antigen processing along specific pathways for T-cell activation;
and the antigen itself. The Antigen Delivery Cassette targets each engineered
antigen to dendritic cells and provides a common key to unlock the potential to
process antigen.

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Drugs Today (Barc). 2008 Apr;44(4):271-8.Links
Sipuleucel-T for the treatment of prostate cancer.
Harzstark AL, Small EJ.
Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA.