Cancer wonderdrug available on prescription

A new "wonderdrug" that will give hope to tens of thousands of women with breast cancer was given the official go-ahead today.

It is being made available on prescription after gaining a licence from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, which oversees the safety of new drugs prescribed on the NHS.

One in nine women in the UK will develop breast cancer and about 41,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. Up until now, women who have had the disease have only been able to take Tamoxifen to stop it returning.

Tamoxifen became the "gold standard" for cancer drugs and is very effective, but can become toxic if taken for longer than five years. One third of women with breast cancer will have a recurrence following surgery, and over half of these cases come about after a course of Tamoxifen has ended. Women coming to the end of their Tamoxifen course often feel their lifeline is being taken away. Femara is now available for those women and can be taken for a further three years after Tamoxifen.

Dr Paul Ellis, consultant medical oncologist at the Guy's, King's and St Thomas' Cancer Centre, said: "Femara is the first treatment that has been shown to offer women at higher risk of recurrence a further improvement in overall survival once they have completed a standard course of Tamoxifen therapy.

"This is clearly a very important development in the treatment of post-menopausal women with early breast cancer. Most patients experience few side-effects and the results that we have seen are impressive."

In 2002, 12,840 women in Britain died from breast cancer, making it the second-biggest cause of death from cancer among women,

after lung cancer. Trials of 5,000 women who took Femara after five years of treatment with Tamoxifen showed:

Professor Nigel Bundred, professor of surgical oncology at the Christie Hospital in Manchester, who led the trial, said: "Cur-rently 8,000 women die each year between five and 15 years after their cancer was diagnosed. This drug can now prevent 40 per cent of those deaths over 10 years. This is a very important evolutionary step to curing breast cancer.

"It is a very big step in our understanding of how breast cancer grows and it is clearly going to prevent deaths. It is not an expensive drug in terms of the number of lives saved.

"A lot of women were anxious about coming to the end of their Tamoxifen and will be delighted they will have something to swap to. It has huge benefit."