NICE

On the heels of the U.K. spending watchdog's rejection of Roche's ($RHHBY) skin cancer drug Zelboraf, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has denied the Swiss drugmaker's Avastin to combat late-stage breast cancer.

Roche ($RHHBY) has again had a cancer treatment rejected by the U.K.'s cost containment agency. This time, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) said that while using Avastin with the chemotherapy treatment Xeloda delayed the progression of breast cancer than chemotherapy alone, there was insufficient evidence that patients ultimately lived longer.

In drug development circles the U.K.'s NICE is known as something of a Grinch. Developers routinely spend huge sums getting their drugs through the regulatory process only to have the agency bat them down as too expensive.

With drugmakers flocking to lucrative drug markets for specialty care drugs, the bar has risen to get reimbursement and physician uptake of the expensive products. But there are ways to hedge bets in the specialty care game. We covered several such strategies during a panel I moderated at the 2012 BIO International Convention called "Are Healthcare Reimbursement Policies a Barrier to Specialty Care Treatment?" The easy answer to this question is "yes."