The U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, recommended Merck & Co. Inc.'s Keytruda for bladder cancer patients.
The treatment will be available under the country's Cancer Drugs Fund, which was established to pay for cancer therapies for a period of time before they are definitively approved or rejected by NICE.
The regulator said Keytruda, which is also known as pembrolizumab, met its criteria of being cost-effective for urothelial carcinoma patients whose disease worsened despite receiving chemotherapy.
According to estimates provided by the regulator, the treatment would cost anywhere between £44,504 and £46,447 for every year a patient's life is extended, within an acceptable limit of £50,000 per year for end-of-life treatments.
The price for every 100-milligram vial will be about £2,630, excluding tax, based on the company's submission.
Patients will be treated with the medicine for two years from the date of their first dosage, recommended at 200 milligrams every three weeks. The treatment may be stopped earlier in the event of disease progression.
The approval was based on data from the company's Keynote-045 trial, which showed that Keytruda was better than chemotherapy in the patient population.
