Dendreon is pricing Provenge high and for the first year its availability will be low, according to a report today in Xconomy, a Seattle business website. Provenge, the first immunotherapy to win FDA approval for treatment of men with prostate cancer, will cost $93,000 per patient. Only 2,000 patients will be treated with Provenge in the first year.

SEATTLE, April 29, 2010 –Dendreon Corporation (Nasdaq: DNDN) today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved PROVENGE(®) (sipuleucel-T), an autologous cellular immunotherapy for the treatment of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic metastatic, castrate-resistant (hormone-refractory) prostate cancer (CRPC). Provenge is designed to induce an immune response against Prostatic Acid Phosphatase (PAP), an antigen expressed in most prostate cancers, and is the first in a new therapeutic class known as autologous cellular immunotherapies.

The U.S. government’s cancer research network is in severe disarray according to a report by the Institute of Medicine. Waste and inefficiency cause 40% of all late-stage government funded cancer trials to be abandoned before completion, the report found. Shannon Pettypiece at Bloomberg.com and Liz Jones at FierceBiotech say the report paints a doomladen picture.

“The system used to conduct cancer clinical trials in the U.S. is ‘approaching a state of crisis,’ with waste and inefficiency creating difficulties for those wanting to undertake these studies,” Jones writes.

In light of favorable results from the Phase 1-2 trial of MDV 3100 for advanced prostate cancer, a Phase 3 trial is enrolling at sites in the US, Canada, South America, UK, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Results from the earlier trial are published online by the UK medical journal The Lancet.