Roche said this morning it had filed for approval of its cancer drug Avastin as a treatment for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in the EU, continuing the rapid roll-out of new indication for its 'pipeline in a product'.
Avastin (bevacizumab) is already approved for colorectal cancer and has also been filed for approval in breast cancer in Europe and the USA, although Roche suffered a disappointment after there were disappointing results for Avastin in pancreatic cancer. The company filed Avastin for the NSCLC indication in the USA in April.
The expansion of its labelling to include breast cancer and NSCLC would give Avastin a green light in the three most common cancers, and add momentum to an already fast-growing product.
Sales of the drug soared 119% to 1.4 billion Swiss francs ($1.14bn) in the first six months of 2006.
So how good is it?
The core of the dossier came from a US study (E4599) which found that NSCLC patients treated with Avastin plus paclitaxel and carboplatin chemotherapy had a 20% reduction in the risk of death compared to patients receiving chemotherapy alone, while the median survival in the Avastin group was 12.3 months, compared to 10.3 months for the chemotherapy arm.
Progression-free survival increased by a third to 6.4 months with Avastin, while the overall response rate was 29%, compared to 13% in the control group.
Hmmm? And how much will this all cost?
Source: PharmaTimes
2 comments:
Actually, Jack, a better question to ask is "How much is a lifespan that's 6 months longer worth?"
;)
All other questions pale in comparison.
RJS
For a while now I've been thinking this over.
The artist David Hockney said in a recent interview that we all focus too much on life measured by length rather than depth or intensity of experience.
My own father when told of his cancer refused chemo on the grounds that "he'd had a good innings and would prefer to be kept pain free and not be puking his guts up".
I'm from the same mould.
Others might disagree. Thats fine. If someone wanted to, say, prolong their life to be able to see an important family event (a wedding, for example) then fine.
To them an extra few months might matter.
Everything that has lived will die.
The important thing is to squeeze everything you can out of the "living" bit!
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