China approves Roche cancer drug Kadcyla

pharmafile | January 22, 2020 | News story | Business Services China, Roche, breast cancer, cancer treatment, oncology 

China has approved the import of Roche’s drug for breast cancer, just after it recently won expanded approval in the US, Canada and Europe.

The drug is an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC). Like other ADCs, it is a type of treatment that combines cancer-tracking proteins with powerful cell toxins. They are becoming more popular as a treatment as companies like Roche and GlaxoSmithKline have tested a record number of these compounds in people.

In China, it has been approved for people with HER2-positive early breast cancer who have residual invasive disease after neoadjuvant taxane and treatment based on another Roche drug Herceptin. It was granted priority review in June by China’s National Medical Product Administration.

Over the 2010’s, China has become Roche’s second biggest market after the US, and made $4.5 billion in Chinese sales in 2018. Overall sales in the Chinese market improved by 50% during the first nine months of 2019.

Kadcyla was first approved in 2013 by the FDA as a clinical trial showed that it improved the time women diagnosed with advanced-stage HER2-positive disease lived without the cancer growing compared to a treatment of their doctor’s choice. The drug surpassed $1 billion in sales last year.

Conor Kavanagh

 

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