The National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) has announced that Avastin should soon be authorized for treat AMD, a degenerative disease of the retina, common in the elderly. Avastin, an anticancer medicine which has also been shown to be effective against AMD, should in principle be available from the first half of 2015 as part of a temporary recommendation for use (RTU) procedure.
If it gets the green light from the health authorities, then Lucentis, the current treatment prescribed to treat this eye disease, should face a serious competitor. Lucentis, marketed by the Novartis laboratory, costs twenty to thirty times more expensive than Avastin (around 900 euros for the injection for the first against 30 to 50 euros for the second).
For Health Insurance, this next authorization of Avastin would be good news since Lucentis costs too much: it represented the first expenditure item for Social Security last year, or 428 million euros, according to Le Figaro.
On the other hand, this news is less pleasing to the Roche laboratory, which does not find it convenient financially to let Avastin be overtaken by Lucentis, manufactured by one of its subsidiaries. But it is a safe bet that despite the disappointment of the laboratory, public health concerns should take precedence over economic interests.
