Health Minister Sussan Ley has paid tribute to AstraZeneca and urged other companies to follow its lead on the recently expanded listing for NOLVADEX (tamoxifen).
Minister Ley announced the expanded listing on Saturday at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne.
PBAC recommended off-patent tamoxifen as a preventive treatment for breast cancer at its March 2016 meeting. AstraZeneca managing director Paul Spittle previously told PharmaDispatch the company sought the listing despite knowing it will never deliver any commercial benefit.
"...we simply thought it was the right thing to do from a patient perspective," he said.
Speaking to PharmaDispatch, Minister Ley said AstraZeneca had done the research, collected the evidence, and pursued the expanded listing despite the absence of a clear commercial benefit.
"It's a very positive development," she said. "When I've met with pharmaceutical companies I've seen them act in the public interest in various ways, including in making medicines available to patients in an off-label situation in compassionate circumstances. I've really appreciated that and I see this as a more formal extension of that so I do think it's worth noting AstraZeneca have really helped patients."
The original idea for widening access to tamoxifen followed discussions between AstraZeneca, the Medical Oncology Group of Australia (MOGA), the peak representative body for medical oncologists, and the Breast Cancer Network Australia (BCNA). The discussions followed changes in international guidelines and the FDA that positioned the drug for primary prevention of breast cancer.
NOLVADEX has been used to treat breast cancer for several decades. Recent large international clinical trials, which included Australian women, demonstrated when taken preventively for 5 years, NOLVADEX can reduce a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer over a 20 year period by more than 30 per cent.
“This represents a paradigm shift in how we manage women at increased risk of breast cancer, and is a major step forward in the fight to reduce the incidence of breast cancer in this country,” said MOGA Chair, Associate Professor Chris Karapetis.
“It means that many women who have been identified as being at increased risk of breast cancer will not get the disease and so will be spared the surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments that are usually required if a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer.”
