Janssen’s Zytiga and Roche’s Tarceva approved by NICE

Janssen and Roche have received positive recommendations from the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for a pair of oncology therapies.

Roche's Tarceva has been endorsed as an option for people with locally advanced or metastatic EGFR mutation-positive non-small-cell lung cancer, offering a new alternative to gefitinib.

Meanwhile, Janssen's Zytiga has been recommended in combination with prednisone or prednisolone as a treatment option for castration-resistant metastatic prostate cancer that has progressed on or after one docetaxel-containing therapy.

Janssen secured approval for Zytiga through the submission of additional clinical data and details of a revised patient access scheme, which will make the drug available to NHS patients at a reduced price.

Professor Carole Longson, director of the Centre for Health Technology Evaluation at NICE, said: "NICE recommends more than 80 percent of the drugs it appraises and we are very pleased to be able to add these two treatments to the list of options available to patients."

This comes after Janssen recently applied for EU and US approval of Zytiga plus prednisone for the treatment of patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic after failure of androgen deprivation therapy and before chemotherapy.