Roche moves to broaden Kadcyla use in biosimilar defense

Roche aims to broaden use of its Kadcyla breast cancer drug as the Swiss pharmaceuticals giant defends itself against rivals who are crowding in with cheaper biosimilar copies of its older, patent-expired mainstay Herceptin. Roche said on Tuesday it submitted an application for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's blessing for Kadcyla, a five-year-old drug that carries a killer chemotherapy payload into cancer cells, for post-surgical use in people with a kind of early breast cancer who still showed signs of disease after pre-surgical treatment. Kadcyla, with 979 million Swiss francs ($981 million) in 2018 sales, is already approved for people with metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer after treatment with Herceptin and chemotherapy.