Dendreon raised $197.4 million in the offering it announced last week, according to a regulatory filing. The Seattle biotech company (NASDAQ: [[ticker:DNDN]]) sold 10.7 million shares of stock at $18.45 apiece last Thursday, about a 15 percent discount on the closing market stock price of $19.76 that day. The sale is expected to close on Wednesday, May 13.
The underwriter of the offering, Deutsche Bank Securities, has an option to purchase another 1.27 million shares at the same terms within 30 days, and it notified the company it plans to buy those shares, according to the filing. That extra share purchase would bring in another $23 million for the company.
The money will be used to support the rapid expansion of manufacturing and marketing of sipuleucel-T (Provenge), Dendreon’s experimental drug for prostate cancer. Last month, the drug showed in a clinical trial that it could extend lives of patients by a median of 4.1 months with minimal side effects. The company plans to seek FDA approval in the fourth quarter of this year, and hopes to begin selling the drug in the U.S. in 2010.
