Journal Of Field Robotics

What Dendreon Can Learn From Robots

My firm has been covering Dendreon ( DNDN ) for most of the last decade. When the company splashed posters at the May 2011 American Urological Association meeting telling urologists Provenge was “Now Available Nationally Without Supply Restrictions,” we started asking questions. Why? Because at that point Wall Street still believed Provenge sales were limited solely by manufacturing capacity, and would be until late in 2011. What was even more surprising was that while urologists agreed that Provenge wasn’t expensive compared to other therapies, they still complained about the effect of prescribing it on practice cash flows. My firm expected urologists to fall all over themselves to prescribe Provenge because of the significant revenue source it provides ($5,800 per patient, the single biggest potential profit center in their practices). Now we were hearing of a barrier to adoption. What we called “uniquely expensive” back in May, Dendreon has since called “cost density” and blamed it for their inability to forecast future sales, an announcement erasing billions from its market cap. While this issue (plus news of NCCN guidelines allowing for use of competitor Zytiga in pre-chemo patients) led us to recommend August puts as insurance to our clients, I have to be honest and say I am still surprised the impact was this bad, this fast. In 2000, Intuitive Surgical ( ISRG ) received FDA approval for using robots to perform surgery. In May 2001, they received clearance from the FDA for using robots to perform laparoscopic prostatectomy -- prostatectomy being the primary treatment modality for newly-diagnosed prostate cancer. In 2004 and 2005, major studies were published claiming better outcomes for patients undergoing prostatectomy by robot versus by hand. And while the issue of robot versus ‘manual’ surgery remains a hotly-debated topic at urology meetings, ISRG has seen the benefits.

The DARPA Urban Challenge free ebook All Free Download Ebooks

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About the book:

This volume, edited by Martin Buehler, Karl Iagnemma and Sanjiv Singh, presents a unique and comprehensive collection of the scientific results obtained by finalist teams that participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge in November 2007, in the mock city environment of the George Air Force base in Victorville, California. This book is the companion of a previous volume by the same editors which was devoted to the Grand Challenge, which took place in the Nevada desert during October 2005, and was the second in the series of autonomous vehicle races sponsored by DARPA. The Urban Challenge demonstrated how cutting-edge perception, control, and motion planning techniques can allow intelligent autonomous vehicles not only to travel significant distances in off-road terrain, but also to operate in urban scenarios. Beyond the value for future military applications–which motivated DARPA to sponsor the race–the expected impact in the commercial sector for automotive manufacturers is equally, if not more, important: autonomous sensing and control constitute key technologies for vehicles of the future, and might help save thousands of lives that are now lost in traffic accidents.

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