Biopharma Business

The UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has granted approval for Roche’s breast cancer drug Kadcyla for routine use within the NHS region.

NICE has recommended Kadcyla for routine funding on the NHS, enabling the drug to be available in the normal way.Currently, Kadcyla is being funded through the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF).

Kadcyla was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Commission (EC)  to treat adults with HER2-positive and unresectable locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who previously received Herceptin (trastuzumab) and a taxane, separately or in combination.

NICE has recommended the breast cancer drug as it can be compared with Herceptin plus capecitabine. It also considered the drug as Roche agreed to reduce the cost of the drug.

Earlier, NICE had compared Kadcyla’s efficacy against a different combination of treatments, as the Herceptin plus capecitabine is now considered standard treatment for people with advanced breast cancer.

The drug has been approved within the region based on the clinical and cost effectiveness analysis using this comparator, as well integrating the new commercial access agreement and applying end-of-life criteria.

NICE is evaluating 24 drugs available in the CDF, of which 17 were approved for routine use.

NICE centre for health technology evaluation director professor Carole Longson said: “The committee acknowledged the comments received from patients during the consultation on the draft recommendations for trastuzumab emtansine, in particular that 115,000 people had signed a Breast Cancer Now petition urging NICE and the company to ensure that it remains available.

“We are therefore very pleased that the company and NHS England have been able to agree a deal that will achieve this. Since we started reassessing the drugs available through the Cancer Drugs Fund, companies have responded positively and shown that they can offer good deals when it comes to pricing.”