Scottish Medicines Consortium approves Roche's Avastin for hard-to-treat ovarian cancer

8 September 2015

The Scottish Medicines Consortium has approved Avastin (bevacizumab) from Swiss pharma giant Roche (ROG: SIX) for platinum-resistant recurrent ovarian cancer.

Avastin has been approved in combination with paclitaxel chemotherapy to treat recurrent ovarian cancer resistant to platinum-containing chemotherapy. This is the first time that a health technology assessment body in the UK has recommended the routine funding of Avastin on the National Health Service. In fact, just last week Avastin was even dropped from the NHS England/Cancer Drug Fund listing of cancer drugs (The Pharma Letter September 5).

This approval was based on data showing that adding Avastin to chemotherapy nearly doubled the median progression-free survival, taking it from 3.4 months to 6.7 months.

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