NICE recommendation expands market for Roche drug

Roche's cancer drug MabThera has been recommended for use on Britain's state health service as a maintenance therapy for patients with follicular non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, expanding the market for the medicine.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which decides if drugs are cost effective, had previously opposed the new use, but the agency said on Tuesday it had changed its mind in the light of fresh evidence.

MabThera, also known as Rituxan and generically as rituximab, is widely used to treat non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, as well as rheumatoid arthritis.

Using it routinely to also prevent or delay relapses of follicular lymphoma in patients who responded to initial treatment is a newer idea.

Standard practice has been for doctors to wait for the cancer to grow again before giving further treatment, but NICE said the evidence showed that maintaining patients on MabThera could prevent the spread and growth of cancer by three to four years.

"Alongside its proven clinical effectiveness, the appraisal committee has also established that rituximab first-line maintenance offers value for money for the NHS (National Health Service)," said NICE's clinical and public health director Peter Littlejohns.

Several companies have been exploring the use of cancer drugs as maintenance therapy, potentially adding many months or years of use for the expensive medicines.

In case of MabThera, patients on maintenance therapy get the drug every two months for up to two years.

Follicular lymphoma is an incurable blood cancer that commonly has periods of relapse and remission over a number of years. It is one of the most common forms of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and is estimated to affect over 15,000 people in Britain.