[Lani]

Fri Mar 23, 2012 12:56am EDT
(Reuters) - Roche Holding AG will cut the price of two cancer drugs in India from 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, days after an Indian drugmaker was allowed to make and sell a blockbuster cancer drug at a fraction of its market price.

Tuygan Goeker, head of Middle East and Asian markets at Roche, named the drugs as Herceptin and Mabthera, the wholesale costs of which are about $3,000 to $4,500 a month per patient.

He declined to say how much their costs would be reduced, but said the drugs would also be renamed, and packed locally by Emcure Pharmaceuticals Ltd in an effort to gain market share.

Roche hopes the new names, subject to regulatory approval, will prevent wholesalers from buying the less-expensive Indian-packed product and reselling it at a profit in other markets, where it would not be licensed for sale, Goeker said.

Earlier this month, the Indian government for the first time allowed local drugmaker Natco Pharma to make and sell a generic version of German drugmaker Bayer's Nexavar, a liver and kidney cancer drug inside the country.

That effectively ended Bayer's exclusive rights to the drug under what is known as a compulsory license, available to nations to issue in certain cases where life-saving treatments are unaffordable.

With around 40 percent of the population living below the poverty line, healthcare is an upper-middle-class luxury in much of India where spending in private clinics is four times the amount of that in government hospitals.