MUMBAI: India's No. 2 drugmaker Cipla has slashed the prices of three of its anti-cancer drugs by up to 63%, a move that comes six months after it announced similar price cuts on three other anti-cancer products.The company said on Thursday that its lung cancer drug Erlocip would cost Rs 9,900 for 30 tablets instead of Rs 27,000 and Rs 3,700 for 10 tablets, down from Rs 10,000. Erlotinib, sold under the brand name Erlocip, is the drug for which Cipla recently won a patent litigation battle with the Swiss drugmaker Roche , which sells the drug under the brand name Tarceva.Docetaxel and Capecitabine, used in breast cancer , will now cost half the earlier price, at Rs 7,000 for 120mg, and Rs 600 for 10 500mg tablets respectively, the company said."We have had a good quarter this time and it has been 15 years since we started the Cipla Palliative Care Centre, so it was the right time to announce this," the company's chairman and managing director, YK Hamied, told ET.In May, Cipla had similarly reduced the prices of three kidney cancer drugs, including Sorafenib, which received India's first compulsory licence. Some experts said Cipla's latest price cuts were along expected lines."Most competitors are already aware of Cipla's strategy, so within two to four weeks, you will see them acting on this, if they feel the need to do so," said Hitesh Sharma, who leads the national life sciences division at consultancy firm E&Y.However, others said the drastic price cuts were bound to put pressure on Cipla's competitors. "Overnight, if a drug that costs lakhs of rupees comes down to thousand rupees, it intensifies price war among companies and deepens pricing pressure," said Sujay Shetty, head of life sciences at PwC.Already, Natco Pharma , which won the first compulsory licence for Bayer 's Nexavar, has cut the price to Rs 8,800 from Rs 2.8 lakh before the patent office ruling. A Natco official said the company was considering further price reduction across its range of anti-cancer drugs.India's anti-cancer drug market, estimated at about Rs 1,500 crore, is primarily controlled by multinational companies. The prices of cancer drugs have been a cause of concern in recent years and activists have been demanding that these drugs be made more affordable."If we win more patent cases against the multinationals, we will definitely cut the prices," said Hamied.According to the World Health Organisation , nearly 2.5 million patients are diagnosed with cancer in India every year and, in its report released in June, it said that cancer would be the "deadliest disease" over the next decade.