Roche expands Herceptin franchise
pharmafile | February 8, 2010 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Herceptin, Roche, gastric cancer, stomach cancer
Roche’s blockbuster breast cancer treatment Herceptin has been launched in the UK as a treatment for stomach cancer.
It is a boost for the Herceptin franchise – already worth $4.8 billion to the manufacturer – demonstrating that targeting HER2-positive tumours does not restrict it to treating breast cancer.
One in six patients have gastric cancer that is HER2-positive and European regulatory advisers recommended Herceptin for approval in December, based on results from the ToGA trial.
This looked at Herceptin (trastuzumab) in combination with standard chemotherapy – Roche’s own Xeloda (capecitabine) or intravenous 5-FU and cisplatin – to treat HER2-positive locally advanced or metastatic gastric cancer.
ToGA suggests that the brand increases life expectancy to 16 months, up from 11.8 months with chemotherapy alone.
“Trastuzumab is the first ever biological drug that is effective against HER2-positive metastatic gastric cancer,” said Dr Mark Harrison, consultant oncologist at the Mount Vernon Cancer Centre in London.
Adding the drug to chemotherapy improved patients’ overall survival without compromising their quality of life, the trial said. The most common side effects were nausea, neutropenia and vomiting.
NICE is due to offer guidance on the drug in its new therapy area by the end of the year but Roche points out that there is nothing to stop Herceptin being prescribed before then.
Gastric cancer is aggressive with poor prognosis and low survival rates; there are around 8,000 new cases in the UK each year.
Four-fifths of these are diagnosed when the cancer is already at the metastatic stage and only 15% of patients survive beyond five years.
Extending indications is important to Roche as it seeks to protect Herceptin against competitors such as GlaxoSmithKline’s Tykerb/Tyverb (lapatinib), which was approved for use in metastatic breast cancer in 2007.
In January Roche announced it would spend 190 million Swiss francs ($183m) at facilities in Switzerland and Germany to produce a new formulation of Herceptin that can be delivered subcutaneously.
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