Here at Health Blog headquarters, we’ve been intrigued by the career of John Johnson ever since he left a company called Johnson & Johnson . That was back in 2007, when he became CEO of ImClone Systems, which was eventually acquired by Eli Lilly. Today, Johnson, who is 53, was named president, chief executive and chairman-elect of Dendreon, succeeding 43-year-old Mitch Gold, who remains executive chairman until June 30. Gold has been CEO for nearly a decade. ( Here’s the WSJ story .) In an interview with the Health Blog, the two men described the move as a natural transition as Dendreon, which sells the prostate treatment Provenge, seeks to morph from a company that was focused on getting its first drug to market to one commercializing a product for a global market. “We’re right at that cusp in the evolution of a company where you have to step outside the way you’ve operated,” says Johnson, who has been a Dendreon board member for about six months. He takes over as the company is trying to regain traction after missing ambitious sales targets for Provenge in last year’s second half by a wide margin. The company partly blamed physician uncertainty around reimbursement for the $93,000 treatment, an issue it says is now essentially resolved. Johnson says his top two priorities in his new post are to increase prescribing of Provenge by oncologists and urologists in the U.S. and to cut the cost of producing the treatment. Provenge, given in three separate infusions, works by prompting

the body’s immune system to fight prostate tumors. It uses a patient’s own cells, which are shipped for processing at one of three manufacturing facilities and then returned to the patient’s doctor for infusion. The treatment’s complexity and, some analysts believe, its hefty price have also affected adoption of Provenge. We asked Johnson if achieving lower production costs might lead to a price reduction. “I haven’t dug into the sensitivity to the price and what physicans’ reactions are,” he says. He plans to meet with doctors at a cancer meeting in San Francisco during the next couple of days “to understand what’s going through their minds and what we can do to help.” Dendreon may also have to contend with an increasingly competitive market for treatments for advanced prostate cancer, including a drug being developed by Medivation called MDV3100. Researchers released data Tuesday showing the pill extended survival in such patients and it could be on the market as soon as later this year. Gold says he considers the data good news for Dendreon because he believes the drugs will be used in combination. “That’s going to result in a [better] overall survival benefit,” he says. Johnson said he also plans to ramp up efforts to get Provenge on the market in Europe, which could happen beginning next year if it’s approved by regulators there. Dendreon shares were up more than 6% to $14.43 in early afternoon trading. Photo: Bloomberg News

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A Man Named Johnson Takes the Reins at Dendreon