Study boosts Roche’s Avastin in breast cancer

* Avastin meets goal in breast cancer clinical trial

* Study shows Avastin can be added to common chemotherapies

* Roche stock up 4.1 percent

ZURICH (Reuters) - Roche Holding AG, the world’s largest maker of cancer drugs, said on Monday that Avastin met its primary endpoint in a Phase III breast cancer trial.

Roche said Avastin, which it markets with Genentech Inc, increased the time breast cancer patients live without the disease worsening and the study confirmed that Avastin can be combined effectively with commonly used chemotherapies.

Avastin was tested in combination with either taxane-based, anthracycline-based or Xeloda (capecitabine) chemotherapies. The results will be submitted for presentation at a future medical meeting, the company said.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley said the data provided another confirmation of Avastin’s role in breast cancer, and would give doctors a wider choice of background therapies for use with the drug.

Avastin was first developed for bowel cancer but its use in breast cancer is expected to be a key driver of sales in future.

“We expect the stock to trade up on this news, as Street expectations for Avastin penetration in MBC (metastatic breast cancer) increase,” they wrote in a research note.

“However, given the still-unresolved Genentech minority take-out, we anticipate near-term Roche upside to be limited.”

Roche is seeking to buy the 44 percent of Genentech it does not already own for $43.7 billion. But Genentech’s share price has fallen well below the $89 offer price as concerns mount about Roche’s funding of the bid, given the credit crisis.

Roche stock was up 4.1 percent at 156.60 Swiss francs by 0850 GMT, outperforming a 2.3 percent rise in the European drugs sector.

(Reporting by Jason Rhodes and Ben Hirschler; Editing by Rupert Winchester)

Source

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Posts:


LONDON (Reuters) - Roche Holding AG’s lung cancer drug Tarceva has won final approval for use by Britain’s state health service after the Swiss drugmaker agreed to discount the price of the medicine. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) now recommends Tarceva as an alternative to Sanofi-Aventis SA’s Taxotere for people who have

Full Post: Roche wins final UK okay for discounted Tarceva
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LONDON (Reuters) - Genentech and Roche’s cancer drug Avastin can help find tumors as well as treat them, scientists said on Wednesday. After tagging the antibody drug with a radioactive tracer and injecting it into mice, researchers found it successfully targeted cancer cells and this enabled them to produce well-defined images of tumors during scanning. When compared

Full Post: Cancer drug Avastin may work as imaging tool too
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Nearly one in five cancer drugs entering development now reach the market, a remarkably good success rate given the high level of failures in other disease areas, British researchers said on Friday . A study by Cancer Research UK, based on 974 cancer drugs starting initial Phase I clinical trials since

Full Post: Modern cancer drugs more likely to get to market
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A combination of Genentech Inc’s cancer drug Rituxan and chemotherapy reduces by 41 percent the risk of death or cancer progression, compared with chemotherapy alone, for patients with a common form of leukemia, the company said on Saturday. Results from the pivotal- or final-stage trial found that previously untreated patients given the

Full Post: Genentech drug boosts leukemia patient survival
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Combining two chemotherapy drugs with two targeted therapies was safe and appeared to help patients with advanced lung cancer live longer, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday. The combination of Roche and Co’s Avastin, ImClone’s Erbitux, carboplatin and paclitaxel appeared to add an average of two months to

Full Post: Four drug combination helps in lung cancer: U.S. study

Site Navigation

Most Read

Search

Contact

  • kinwrite.com@gmail.com