Roche's Avastin launched in Europe

The drug was introduced in the UK last week and has also been made available in Germany and Switzerland, said a spokesman for the company. Avastin was co-developed with Genentech, which introduced the drug in its first market, the US, last year.

The drug is a monoclonal antibody raised against vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), one of the primary mediators of blood vessel growth (angiogenesis). It has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use alongside the chemotherapeutic drug 5-fluorouracil in patients with advanced colorectal cancer. In Europe it has been approved for first-line treatment of patients with colorectal cancer in combination with chemotherapy. The drug is the first to extend the life of colorectal cancer patients, showing a 30 per cent improvement in clinical trials, adding 5 months to the 15 month extension achieved by chemotherapy alone.

Roche said that Avastin would be priced at £944 (€1,350) per 400mg vial, or £1,800 per patient per month, adding that was set at a similar level to Merck KGaA's Erbitux (cetuximab), another biologic drug for colorectal cancer which was approved in Europe last summer.

The two antibodies are going head-to-head in the marketplace and also clinically. A US government-sponsored trial got underway earlier this year that will provide the first direct comparison of the two drugs. In the US, Genentech priced Avastin at $4,400 per month at launch, roughly a thousand dollars a month higher than in the UK.

The concept of treating cancer by blocking angiogenesis was first put forward in the 1970s by Judah Folkman, then a professor of surgery at the Boston Children's Hospital in the US.

Since then, dozens of compounds designed to treat cancer by blocking angiogenesis have entered into development and failed, including endostatin and angiostatin, which were originally discovered by Folkman but abandoned by licensee company EntreMed in 2002.

Avastin is also in Phase III testing for non-small cell lung cancer and metastatic breast cancer, with additional studies ongoing in kidney, ovarian and pancreatic cancers.

The antibody achieved $555m in sales for Genentech in 2004 - making it the US firm's second biggest drug after lymphoma treatment Rituxan (rituximab) and pushing breast cancer drug Herceptin (trastuzumab) back into third place. Analysts have suggested that Avastin could bring in sales of around $1.7bn in 2005, rising towards the $2.5bn mark in 2006. And if additional indications are approved, peak sales could top $3.5bn, according to analysts at Lehman Brothers.

Roche also said it would be filing a submission to the UK National Institute of Clinical Excellence in the summer. The NICE, which delivers cost effectiveness judgements for drugs prescribed under the UK National Health Service, will also consider Erbitux in its deliberations.