Roche gets UK approval for lower-priced Tarceva

LONDON (Reuters) - Roche's (ROG.VX) lung cancer drug Tarceva has been recommended for use on Britain's state-funded health service after the Swiss drugmaker agreed to cut the price of the medicine.

Roche and Britain's main cost-effectiveness watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), said on Friday they had reached a deal for Tarceva to be supplied at the same overall treatment cost as Sanofi-Aventis's (SASY.PA) Taxotere.

The draft recommendation is expected to be confirmed in final guidance to be issued next month by NICE, the body responsible for determining which treatments should be funded by the state in England and Wales.

NICE had previously recommended against Tarceva, arguing that buying the costly drug -- also known as erlotinib -- was not a good use of National Health Service (NHS) resources.

The new price for a 125-day course of treatment is 6,128 pounds ($10,830), compared with a previous typical cost of 6,800 pounds, according to NICE's website here

Tarceva -- which is relatively unusual among cancer treatments in that it is given by mouth rather than injection -- is one of a new generation of targeted drugs that attack only cancer cells and are tolerated better than traditional chemotherapy.

It was licensed and launched in Britain in 2005 but Roche has since been fighting to get it paid for on the NHS.

Roche had already announced last October that it was cutting the British price of Tarceva as an interim measure to ensure patients got access to the treatment while NICE deliberated.

That move was also designed to bring the cost of Tarceva down to the same level of Sanofi's older drug Taxotere.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Quentin Bryar)