UK bows on breast cancer drug

Briton Ann Marie Rogers (C) won a legal appeal to force her local health authority pay for Herceptin. Picture / Reuters.

LONDON - Herceptin, the drug at the centre of protests over healthcare rationing, should be used in early breast cancer and be paid for by the state health service, Britain's cost-effectiveness watchdog said on Friday.

The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has been under intense pressure to give Swiss group Roche's drug a green light after women with early stage disease went to court to force local health authorities to pay for it.

Nice issued its draft guidance in record time - just two weeks after the drug was licensed for early use as an adjuvant by European regulators.

Its final recommendation is expected early next month, assuming no appeals, which will clear the way for Herceptin to be prescribed on the state-run National Health Service (NHS) for women with aggressive HER2 breast cancer after surgery.

Until now, Herceptin has been recommended for treating only metastatic cancer, a late-stage condition in which tumours have spread around the body. The new approval will extend its use to a much large number of mainly younger patients.

Nice's deliberations are monitored by other Governments, which increasingly have to weigh the benefits of modern medicines against price. Herceptin costs around £20,000 ($NZ59,755) per patient a year.

Karol Sikora, a professor of cancer medicine at Hammersmith Hospital, said there were more such tough choices to come.

"It's gratifying to see Nice respond so quickly to something that will clearly affect over 30,000 women a year," he said.

"But over the next five years, many other high-cost cancer drugs will come on the market, and it's important that we have robust and rapid decision-making processes in place to deal with these."

Many companies are developing targeted cancer therapies that extend lives with far fewer toxic side-effects than standard chemotherapy, but cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Herceptin is not a wonder drug. It only works in just over one in five breast cancer cases, and it can cause cardiotoxicity, which means it is not suitable for heart patients.

But the injectable drug has been shown to clearly prolong survival chances for those women whose tumours contain a large amount of the HER2 protein. It is Roche's third-biggest product, with sales last year of 2.15 billion Swiss francs ($NZ2.91 billion).

- REUTERS