Jon Missin considers himself lucky. The 51-year-old from Northamptonshire, in central England, was diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2015. After he stopped responding to several different therapies aimed at prolonging his life, doctors advised him to try a drug from Sanofi, saying it could give him 11 or 12 months of remission. Only now, three years later, is the myeloma returning.
The extra time allowed Missin to celebrate milestones in his son’s life that he would have otherwise missed — birthdays, the start of primary school and then secondary school. “Without a doubt I wouldn’t be here today,” he said. “My consultant every month has been flabbergasted.”
Missin accessed the treatment, called IsaPD, through the Cancer Drugs Fund, which temporarily finances new medicines in England while the drug pricing regulator — the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence — decides whether they should be available free to patients through the state-run health system.
But earlier this year, the body known as NICE concluded that at a list price of around £16,000 (about $20,400) a month, IsaPD is too expensive to be funded by the National Health Service. Missin and around 1,500 patients given the therapy before the decision can continue to take it. New patients won’t be able to receive it through the NHS.
The rejection of IsaPD — along with a breast cancer treatment from AstraZeneca Plc and Daiichi Sankyo Co Ltd, called Enhertu, which has a list price of about £10,000 a month — comes about two years after NICE adopted a more stringent approach to assessing cancer medicines. Amid rising diagnoses and the worst crisis in the NHS’s history, the new system has culminated in a standoff between the regulator, drug makers and the government.
Pharmaceutical companies are warning that the UK risks losing investment, while activists led by groups like Breast Cancer Now are campaigning for the drugs to be made available. The regulator has so far refused to budge. It says that people suffering from a wider range of diseases are benefiting from the new methodology and that early evidence shows a higher proportion of cancer drugs are now being recommended, albeit from a much smaller dataset. The government currently shows no appetite to intervene by asking NICE to change its methods, which could result in an increase in overall drug spending.
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