Bayer HealthCare and co-developer Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc has announced that they have received approval from Chinese regulators for Nexavar to help treat metastatic hepatocellular carcinoma or liver cancer.

China has 350,000 new liver cancer patients every year, according to Leng Xisheng, president of the Chinese Collegeof Surgeons.

The companies stated the medicine represents the first systemic therapy for liver cancer patients in the Asian country. In 2005, Nexavar, an oral anticancer drug, became the first new treatment in more than a decade for advanced kidney cancer.

Nexavar, also known as sorafenib, is approved in the United States and Europe for kidney and liver cancer. The medicine is approved in over 40 countries to treat liver cancer, and more than 70 countries to treat kidney cancer.

Moreover Bayer and Onyx intend to carry out further analysis and to study the possibility of selling Nexavar for a broad range of cancers, including breast cancer.

Earlier this year, Susan Kelley, a Bayer vice president overseeing cancer medicines, said that “Nexavar has proven significant clinical benefit for patients with liver cancer and advanced kidney cancer and we will continue to investigate its potential across a wide variety of tumors.”

“The liver cancer incidence rate is still increasing in China,” Leng Xisheng, president of the Chinese Collegeof Surgeons and the director of Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery at Peking University People’s Hospital was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua.

Liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the world and the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally. More than 600,000 cases of liver cancer are diagnosed worldwide each year (about 19,000 in the United States, 54,000 in Europe, and 390,000 in China, Korea and Japan) and incidence is increasing.