Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Bayer AG said their Nexavar pill, approved for liver and kidney tumors, increased lives of women with advanced breast cancer by causing delay in growth of malignancies that had spread or recurred.

Onyx's only marketed medicine generated $677 million in 2008 sales and N. Anthony Coles, president and chief executive officer of the Emeryville, a California-based company, said the drug will produce $850 million to $875 million in sales this year and be a billion-dollar product next year without approval for breast cancer.

Dr Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University in Washington, while presenting her findings at the American Association for Cancer Research's San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium said, "Hormone-receptor positive breast cancers eventually become resistant to hormonal therapy."

"Great interest is seen in figuring out how we might stop cancer cells from figuring out how to avoid the hormonal therapy," Isaacs said over telephone.

About 35 Women were given aromatase inhibitor and Nexavar and 23 per cent women had benefited from it. It means they either had shrinkage of their tumors or it stayed stable, Isaacs informed.

Aromatase inhibitors include anastrozole, made by AstraZeneca under the brand name Arimidex, and exemestane, made by Pfizer Inc, under the brand name Aromasin.

Hope Rugo, a breast cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, said, "A patient that she treated with Nexavar and Xeloda developed a hand-foot reaction that was so intolerable that she couldn't walk."