UK's NICE does U-turn on Pfizer's Inlyta for advanced kidney cancer

4 March 2014

UK drug watchdog the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) this morning published preliminary guidance which recommends US pharma giant Pfizer’s (NYSE: PFE) Inlyta (axitinib) as an option for treating adults with advanced renal cell carcinoma after failure of treatment with a first-line tyrosine kinase inhibitor or a cytokine.

This follows a previous negative recommendation (The Pharma Letter March 28, 2013), which was appealed by Pfizer, the Royal College of Physicians, James Whale Fund for Kidney Cancer and Kidney Cancer UK.

Inlyta, for which global annual sales are projected at some $555 million by 2016, was approved in Europe and the USA in 2012 for advanced kidney cancer (The Pharma Letters September 5, and January 30, 2012). The drug has also been approved in a number of other countries, including Switzerland, Japan, Canada, Australia and Korea.

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