Breast Cancer Blockade

Decisions by regulators in the U.S. and U.K. last week will keep two cancer compounds from Roche and its Genentech Inc. unit - Avastin bevacizumab and trastuzumab-DM1 - from patients, at least in the near term.

On Tuesday, the U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) concluded that a patient access scheme proposed by Roche was so complicated it actually raised rather than lowered the cost of providing Avastin as part of combination therapy to patients with first-line metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC)...