Dendreon’s CEO Mitchell Gold traded some of his stock during the high period following the FDA Advisory panel vote on his company’s prostate cancer immunotherapy sipuleucal-T (Provenge). Gold told the WSJ Health blog that he sold “less than 20%” of his holdings in the company following the upbeat FDA advisory panel vote. “it’s all public,” he said, without elaborating.

More of a surprise is to see that Steve Fleischmann, one the patients who spoke passionately to the FDA committee, did the same:

Before the stock tanked some savvy investors cashed in. One of them was businessman Steve Fleischmann, who became a prostate cancer patient, activist and Dendreon shareholder all in the same year. “I bought Dendreon in 2003;I’ve owned it for years,” he told the Health Blog. But he shed some of his shares after Dendreon surged at the end of March on a panel of experts’ recommendation that FDA approve the vaccine. He declined to quantify his holdings or profits, but said, “I wanted to take some of my chips off the table so I wasn’t so invested. It’s natural.”

Still, Fleischmann decried the protracted tug of war among investors in the company: “The sad thing is that Dendreon became more of a stock play than a humanistic play — a game between longs and shorts — and all about padding people’s pockets.”

Wall Street Journal Health Blog

Reviewing Proveng’s chances of FDA approval from the point of view of investors, Matthew Herper gives an overview useful for patients as well. Herper writes:

The FDA has a legal deadline of May 15 to make a decision–although it is possible to break or extend it. But buying the stock in front of this deadline is probably highly risky. There is a reasonable chance the FDA will decide to go against the panel vote and ask for more data. And the downside to the stock if the FDA does delay approval by asking Dendreon for more data is probably much bigger than any potential gain.