Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical company at the centre of the row overcancer drugs pricing, played a significant part in the genesis of the Cancer Drugs Fund, set up in 2010 to pay for drugs that were too expensive forNHS approval. Four years on the company has become the fund's largest beneficiary.

The existence of the fund leads to some confusing results. Kadcyla, the £90,000 advanced breast cancer drug, was rejected on Friday by Nice, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, on cost grounds for general NHS use. But Roche is already being reimbursed from the £600m fund.

A number of other Roche drugs have also been turned down by Nice because of their high cost. The drug that cancer doctors most frequently ask the fund to pay for is Roche's Avastin, rejected for both breast and bowel cancer, which accounts for a quarter of requests.

The fund was a politically expedient creation. It provided a way for any government to take the sting out of tabloid stories that cancer patients were being denied what are always described as "life-saving" drugs, although invariably they are not – at best they extend lives by usually a matter of months.

Key to its establishment was an inquiry, commissioned by the Labour government just before the 2010 election, into spending on drugs in the UK and other countries. Cancer tsar Sir Mike Richards jointly chaired the inquiry with John Melville, then head of Roche Products in the UK.

For more details, go to: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/08/pharmaceutical-roche-benefits-cancer-drug-fund-nice-rejects-kadcyla