New Evidence Raises Questions About Kingsford Capital - Links To TheS... -01/07/10 at 5:20 PM CSTby Mark Mitchell

A blog published by the University of North Carolina School of Journalism reported recently that Steve Cohen of hedge fund SAC Capital managed to kill a story by Reuters reporter Matt Goldstein. It seems that Goldstein was going to shed some light on allegations that Cohen engaged in insider trading. Cohen didn’t like that, and got in touch with Gol...

SEC OIG Investigating SEC Complicity in Naked Short Selling of Dendre... -12/01/09 at 6:35 PM CSTby Mark Mitchell

The Office of the Inspector General of the Securities and Exchange Commission not long ago submitted a semi-annual report to Congress. There are two items in the report of interest to those of us who have argued that the SEC has turned a blind eye towards, or even assisted, unscrupulous hedge funds that make their fortunes destroying public companies for ...

Investing in Death and Dendreon -09/23/09 at 12:49 PM CDTby Mark Mitchell

When Dendreon’s FDA application was derailed simultaneously with a naked short selling attack that flooded the market with tens of millions of phantom shares, Dendreon’s supporters went berserk. They sent the government hundreds of letters complaining about the naked short selling and the apparent machinations of Michael Milken’s associa...

Michael Milken's Prostate Cancer Foundation vs. Dendreon -09/15/09 at 11:33 AM CDTby Mark Mitchell

In July 2008, not long before Cell Genesys announced that its drug was killing people, CNBC’s Jim Cramer called Dendreon a “dog.” Cramer, of course, did not mention that the illegal naked short selling of Dendreon was continuing apace. Throughout that month, more than 1 million Dendreon shares “failed to deliver” every day, a...

Cell Genesys and Dendreon Inc. - If Only There Was A Pattern -09/04/09 at 11:57 AM CDTby Mark Mitchell

In December 2007, three U.S. Congressmen — Mike Michaud (D-Maine), Dan Burton (R-Indiana) and Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) — called on the House Commerce Committee to investigate why the FDA failed to approve Dendreon’s treatment for prostate cancer. Referring to Dr. Scher and his ally, Dr. Hussain, the lawmakers said in a letter that “there...

PIPE Dreams at Dendreon -08/21/09 at 1:55 PM CDTby Mark Mitchell

“Black Wednesday at the FDA.” That is how Dr. Mark Thornton, a former medical officer in the FDA’s Office of Oncology Products, described the FDA’s decision not to approve Dendreon’s Provenge.  In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Thornton described vaccines such as Provenge as the “Holy Grail of cancer tr...

Dendreon and the Criminal Capture of the FDA -08/13/09 at 9:30 AM CDTby Mark Mitchell

Who in the government helped sabotage Dendreon? Despite the lobbying by the captured doctors, despite the Wall Street whispering, despite the singing Sendek and the media mimics — despite all of this, it still seemed likely that the FDA would heed the advice of its advisory panel. Instead, the FDA told Dendreon that it would not yet approve its trea...

When Dendreon Failed To Deliver -08/06/09 at 2:41 PM CDTby Mark Mitchell

On April 20, three weeks after the advisory panel vote, and one week after Dr. Scher’s missive appeared in The Cancer Letter, Forbes journalist Matthew Herper published a story arguing that there was a good chance the FDA would not approve Dendreon’s cancer treatment outright. “If the agency wants to ask Dendreon for more data, it certa...

Howard Scher's Campaign Against Dendreon -07/31/09 at 12:16 PM CDTby Mark Mitchell

As Dr. Scher made clear in his letter, his concern about Dendreon was not, strictly speaking, that it didn’t work, but that it would render irrelevant his work on Novacea’s competing treatment, Asentar. A new phase 3 trial to test the effectiveness of Asentar (referred to in the letter by its medical name, DN-101) had been “designed, in...

The Dendreon Fraud: Joel Sendek of Lazard Research and ProQuest Inves... -07/24/09 at 12:10 PM CDTby Mark Mitchell

It is easy for executives of public companies to know that they are “battleground” targets of the Milken network because the members of this network have quite distinctive characteristics. Whether they be journalists tied to Cramer, financial analysts, or hedge fund managers, they are unusual among financial professionals in that they take ove...

Jim Chanos, Jonathan Aschoff and More on the Dendreon Saga -07/22/09 at 5:46 PM CDTby Mark Mitchell

When the FDA’s advisory panel voted in favor of Provenge, most Wall Street research analysts were predicting a bright future for Dendreon. But as naked short sellers piled on with ever increasing gusto, hedge fund managers continued to whisper in reporters’ ears. And two Wall Street analysts did more than whisper – they shouted, day afte...