Cancer Research UK, the leading voice of cancer patients in the UK, is asking for patient comments on NICE preliminary decision on whether the National Health Service (NHS) should use four new cancer drugs - bevacizumab, sorafenib, sunitinib and temsirolimus - to treat people with kidney cancer that has spread (‘metastatic renal cell carcinoma’).
Why? Because, despite clinical evidence that these drugs can actually help, NICE has decided that they’re too expensive. In essence, NICE doesn’t think that these four drugs are value-for-money for the NHS.
Currently, the only available treatment for metastatic renal cell cancer is immunotherapy. This halts the disease’s progress for just four months on average. But if people are unsuitable for immunotherapy, or it doesn’t work, that’s it. There’s no other treatment option.
So doctors urgently need new treatments for this disease. And the four drugs NICE has rejected have shown considerable promise in clinical trials.
These four drugs are part of a new generation of cancer drugs, developed after years of painstaking research. They target key processes within the body that get hijacked when cancer develops.
In fact, several of the trials were stopped early, to allow those people not receiving the new treatment to have it. Other trials showed that some of these drugs could stop the cancer from growing for several months more than immunotherapy alone. That doesn’t seem much, but when you’re trying to beat cancer, those extra months can mean a lot. And NICE’s assessment contains details of several such trials.
NICE agreed that patients tended to live longer when they were given these drugs. But they felt that the evidence wasn’t sufficiently robust. And when they put the data from the trials into their computer models, they found that the drugs cost a lot (£20,000 - £35,000 per patient per year) compared to the benefit they brought patients - too much for them to recommend that the NHS prescribe these drugs.
Doctors don’t have a lot to offer people with advanced kidney cancer. If these drugs can help them - and the clinical trials show that they do - shouldn’t they be made available?
The full statement from Cancer Research UK can be found here.
And according to an article in today’s Daily Mail, “Thousands of kidney cancer patients have been handed an 'early death sentence' under plans to ban life-extending new drugs.”
British kidney specialist Tim Eisen, professor of medical oncology at the Cambridge Research Institute, said, “Patients here are receiving medieval treatment. Together these drugs are the single greatest advance for kidney cancer patients in the last 20 years, yet I and my colleagues face the prospect of being unable to offer treatment that is absolutely standard in every other western European country.”
According to the Daily Mail, “… kidney specialists believe this proposal is a watershed because it requires them to act unethically, offering a lower standard of care than elsewhere in western Europe and the US. Instead doctors will be forced to offer interferon - a medication of such limited use that it is prescribed for just one in ten patients in some cancer units.”
The full Daily Mail story can be found here.
And here’s what our London correspondent, Antoine Clarke, has to say on the matter:
“It means that a rare disease will be neglected by the NHS, in a brutal reversal of the complaint made about poor countries where diseases are untreatable because of a lack of available drugs. Here the research has been done, clinical efficacy demonstrated by the ‘greedy’ drugmakers, but no one will get the medicines because the UK government has decided not enough people die of the disease: ‘only’ 3,600 people out of the 7,000 who are stricken by metastatic renal cell carcinoma. And if you dare buy it out of your own pocket, you will be denied ANY treatment by the NHS, including emergency care, but still have to pay for it in national insurance taxes. Welcome to universal healthcare! America’s tort lawyers will love it!”
And to add to that point consider this additional fact: Nexavar (denied to NHS patients in England and Wales) has been cleared in China.
Welcome to "universal" healthcare.
Why? Because, despite clinical evidence that these drugs can actually help, NICE has decided that they’re too expensive. In essence, NICE doesn’t think that these four drugs are value-for-money for the NHS.
Currently, the only available treatment for metastatic renal cell cancer is immunotherapy. This halts the disease’s progress for just four months on average. But if people are unsuitable for immunotherapy, or it doesn’t work, that’s it. There’s no other treatment option.
So doctors urgently need new treatments for this disease. And the four drugs NICE has rejected have shown considerable promise in clinical trials.
These four drugs are part of a new generation of cancer drugs, developed after years of painstaking research. They target key processes within the body that get hijacked when cancer develops.
In fact, several of the trials were stopped early, to allow those people not receiving the new treatment to have it. Other trials showed that some of these drugs could stop the cancer from growing for several months more than immunotherapy alone. That doesn’t seem much, but when you’re trying to beat cancer, those extra months can mean a lot. And NICE’s assessment contains details of several such trials.
NICE agreed that patients tended to live longer when they were given these drugs. But they felt that the evidence wasn’t sufficiently robust. And when they put the data from the trials into their computer models, they found that the drugs cost a lot (£20,000 - £35,000 per patient per year) compared to the benefit they brought patients - too much for them to recommend that the NHS prescribe these drugs.
Doctors don’t have a lot to offer people with advanced kidney cancer. If these drugs can help them - and the clinical trials show that they do - shouldn’t they be made available?
The full statement from Cancer Research UK can be found here.
And according to an article in today’s Daily Mail, “Thousands of kidney cancer patients have been handed an 'early death sentence' under plans to ban life-extending new drugs.”
British kidney specialist Tim Eisen, professor of medical oncology at the Cambridge Research Institute, said, “Patients here are receiving medieval treatment. Together these drugs are the single greatest advance for kidney cancer patients in the last 20 years, yet I and my colleagues face the prospect of being unable to offer treatment that is absolutely standard in every other western European country.”
According to the Daily Mail, “… kidney specialists believe this proposal is a watershed because it requires them to act unethically, offering a lower standard of care than elsewhere in western Europe and the US. Instead doctors will be forced to offer interferon - a medication of such limited use that it is prescribed for just one in ten patients in some cancer units.”
The full Daily Mail story can be found here.
And here’s what our London correspondent, Antoine Clarke, has to say on the matter:
“It means that a rare disease will be neglected by the NHS, in a brutal reversal of the complaint made about poor countries where diseases are untreatable because of a lack of available drugs. Here the research has been done, clinical efficacy demonstrated by the ‘greedy’ drugmakers, but no one will get the medicines because the UK government has decided not enough people die of the disease: ‘only’ 3,600 people out of the 7,000 who are stricken by metastatic renal cell carcinoma. And if you dare buy it out of your own pocket, you will be denied ANY treatment by the NHS, including emergency care, but still have to pay for it in national insurance taxes. Welcome to universal healthcare! America’s tort lawyers will love it!”
And to add to that point consider this additional fact: Nexavar (denied to NHS patients in England and Wales) has been cleared in China.
Welcome to "universal" healthcare.
