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May.01

10:05 AM ET

Friday, 1 May 2009

After Dendreon Week, Time For Lilly's LeWeekend

Posted By:Mike Huckman

Topics:Stock Market | Medicine | Corporate News | Pharmaceuticals

Sectors:Insurance | Health Care Equipment and Services | Health Care | Pharmaceuticals

Companies:eBay Inc | Eli Lilly and Company | Dendreon Corp

I have two reasons to exhale on this TGIF. My month-long stint on the graveyard shift anchoring "Worldwide Exchange" is over and Dendreon is done...for now. After all, Dendreon [DNDN Loading... () ] and its prostate cancer treatment Provenge is the story that just keeps on giving.

Most of the emails I got on DNDN concerned the whacky, lightning-speed selloff in the stock that occured in the couple of minutes before the stock was halted for trading ahead of Tuesday's data release.

Pharma's Market Comments:

Paul Molinini said, "We got sold out for no reason. I have never seen such thievery in all my years trading on DNDN. Those orders should NOT (the caps are his) stand....We had a stop limit at $17.50...." The Nasdaq, at first, said it was investigating a possible "erroneous trade," but a short time later concluded that all trades would stand.

Richard Jakimas is also beside himself. "I was one of the sellers of Dendreon when it started to drop. I feel that it is so unfair. I didn't even have a chance to buy back my shares because Nasdaq stopped the trading of the stock."

Barry Silverstein claimed, "Someone is messing with the stock." Ya' think? "There is no explanation for yesterday's (Tuesday's) actions. Nasdaq and regulatory agencies should be looking closely at this. Some investors got screwed," he said.

Derek Petrak, however, didn't have a limit and hung on for the ride. He wrote, "My heart did stop as I was on the phone yesterday with a client and keeping one eye on CNBC while the down tick was flying by. Hung up on the client and tried to obtain information, but could get nothing. Thank God I don't use stop-losses, but I do have friends that do and they were wiped out!!!! Shame." (The punctuation is his.)

David Levine doesn't understand why an extra 4.1 months of life was reason for celebration. "That is ridiculous, four months, that's just a tease, not a treatment. No one will pay 50-80k for 4 months of life. Save it for a nice funeral and leave a little for the kids," Levine wrote. I agree that progress in the fight against cancer can seem small and incremental, but wow! I wonder if he'd feel that way if he were in the unfortunate position of needing advanced prostate cancer treatment.

On a mugh lighter note, you've gotta love the pharma marketing folks.

At the end of the day at the American Urological Association meeting where the Dendreon data were presented, I journeyed onto the exhibit hall floor to take a couple of pictures. The first one is of me with the bathtubs that Eli Lilly [LLY Loading... () ] uses in its commercials for the impotence drug Cialis.

CNBC.com

The French call it "LeWeekend" because it works for a day-and-a-half. There were signs saying "Keep Off", otherwise I would've gotten into one of them...with my clothes ON, of course.

The other photo is from the nearby "Cialis Cafe" where they had Cialis cocktail tables.

I wonder if the double entendre is deliberate.

In case you're not getting my drift, think about it: Cialis...cocktail...tables.

Cialis
CNBC.com

What an awesome conversation piece one of those would make at a party, right?

Lilly should put them on eBay [EBAY Loading... () ] and donate the proceeds to some worthy cause. I bet someone would pay a lot of cold, hard cash for them.