UPDATE: Roche offers discount to UK NHS for Tarceva

Switzerland-based drug major Roche has agreed to charge the UK's National Health Service a lower price for the lung cancer compound Tarceva (erlotinib), following a negative opinion from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which advises the public sector health care provider on which treatments to cover in the UK, apart from Scotland. Tarceva will be offered as an alternative to prescribers to French drug major Sanofi-Aventis' Taxotere (docetaxel), as a second-line treatment for patients with non-small cell lung cancer, on the basis that overall treatment costs, including for side effects, are not higher. The deal has been struck between the Swiss pharmaceutical firm and the UK Department of Health, with the NICE recommending its approval. Interested parties have until November to appeal against the draft guidance to recommend Tarceva, a spokeswoman for the NICE informed the Marketletter. In the meantime, the agency said "individual cases should be assessed at a local level within the NHS" in England, although the drug is available in Scotland.

The offer is a turnaround from the Swiss drugmaker's previous position: in October last year, the firm offered a 28% rebate for Tarceva (Marketletter October 8, 2007), which was rejected on the grounds that it was still too high (Marketletter May 5). More recently, Roche announced it would not produce a full submission to the NICE for another oncology drug on the grounds that the firm "did not consider it a good use of either public money or indeed Roche's own resources." The year-long deliberations of the government advisory body "would have resulted anyway in a negative guidance," the firm argued (Marketletter July 7).