Prostate cancer patients face rationing of drug

Prostate cancer patients seeking Dendreon Corp.'s new tumor-fighting vaccine, Provenge, face delays of a year or more as hospital waiting lists dwarf the company's capacity to produce medicine. Dendreon can only produce enough Provenge to treat about 2 percent of eligible patients until manufacturing increases in mid-2011, said Chief Operating Officer Hans Bishop. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Duke University's Comprehensive Cancer Center are among hospitals scrambling to decide who should get the drug. Duke is considering principles used for high-demand organ transplants.

Typically, cancer drugs are first approved for a narrow group of difficult-to-treat patients, and by the time they're widely released, there is sufficient supply. The last time a new cancer treatment faced similar shortages was in 1992, with Taxol.

"Until the capacity issues can be addressed, this will not be an effective agent," said Chris Logothetis, head of prostate cancer research at MD Anderson in Houston.

"The waiting list - even as we are telling patients we're not starting a waiting list because we are inundated - is more than 50 patients. This is going to be a problem."

Provenge takes a new approach to treating cancer, drawing blood from the patient's body and training the immune system to attack malignant cells. On average, the medicine helped patients live an extra four months in testing, or twice the benefit of chemotherapy and with fewer side effects.

More than 27,000 men die of prostate cancer each year in the United States and about 200,000 new patients are identified, according to the American Cancer Society. At any given time, as many as 20 percent of patients may qualify for Provenge, Logothetis said.

It takes about a month to prepare each custom-made course of doses, Dendreon's Bishop said. The company plans to make enough to accommodate 2,000 patients in the first year, falling short of the 100,000 patients with advanced tumors who may be eligible to receive it.