Up to 10,000 breast cancer patients are to be given free access to a drug that could save as many as 600 lives a year. Taxotere, a chemotherapy drug already given to women with late-stage breast cancer, will be given to certain women in the early stages of the disease, under draft guidance to be issued today by the government's drugs watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

The guidance comes nine months after the Scottish equivalent of Nice, the Scottish Medicines Consortium, approved the use of Taxotere for Scottish women in the early stages of the disease.

The guidance is still open to consultation, but the final version is not expected to be changed when it is published next month.

David Miles, consultant oncologist at London Bridge hospital, said: "If Taxotere is routinely available in the UK it has the potential to prevent the deaths of hundreds of women with breast cancer each year.

"We welcome this landmark [ruling] from Nice, which represents an important step forward for the treatment of early stage breast cancer in the UK. Results from numerous clinical trials confirm that Taxotere-containing regimens are the foundation for effective treatment strategies at every stage of breast cancer."

The ruling means that from November every primary care trust will be obliged to offer the drug to breast cancer patients whose cancer has spread to their lymph nodes - a condition called early node-positive breast cancer. The patient has to have had surgery and the treatment, the generic name of which is docetaxel, has to be given as part of a cocktail of drugs.

Clinicians believe that as many as 10,000 of the 41,000 women who are diagnosed with breast cancer each year have early node-positive breast cancer. The drug's manufacturer Sanofi-aventis says that six out of 100 of these sufferers will be saved each year by the new treatment.