Cancer drugs should not receive special funding – MS Society
pharmafile | November 4, 2011 | News story | Sales and Marketing | ABPI, Cancer Drugs Fund, MS Society, NICE
The Multiple Sclerosis Society says cancer should not receive special funding as it takes resources away from other diseases.
Laura Weir, head of policy and campaigns at the MS Society, said the UK government’s flagship Cancer Drugs Fund – which injects an extra £200 million a year to subsidise drugs in England either awaiting or not recommended by NICE – was unfair to patients with other diseases.
She said: “It is estimated that the Cancer Drugs Fund will displace £480 million from other patients in the NHS – is this a fair use of resources to help drive forward the uptake of innovative medicines across other disease areas – I don’t think it is.”
She was speaking at the ABPI’s conference in London, which sought to showcase the strength of R&D and innovation in the NHS and pharma.
Weir said that during NICE’s recent appraisal of Novartis’ MS pill Gilenya, an appraisal committee member told her: “It does not seem right that the government can make special allowances for a drug that can give someone, say, an extra three months of extra life when for some other treatments – such as Gilenya – which can give someone a better quality of life for 50 years plus, does not receive the same allowance.”
She said she does not begrudge cancer patients receiving the funds but stressed that there needs to be a consistency in funding across all disease areas, otherwise other patients would be left out.
Dr Joe McGilligan, a GP and chair of the ESyDoc consortia in Surrey, said that in his experience terminal cancer patients did not always want drugs to extend their lives, especially if it was only for a few months.
He said their biggest concern was about where they would die, and believes it is more important to properly fund palliative care and make arrangement for patients to die at home.
NICE: a barrier to access?
As well as her role in the MS society she has also recently become the head of the ‘Patients involved in NICE’ group that aims to help people gain access to NICE-approved medicines more quickly.
When asked by Pharmafocus whether she thought NICE was a barrier to innovation, Weir said: “NICE can be a barrier in some ways because it considers the cost to the NHS and social care, but does not consider the impact a treatment will have on carers, or on a patient’s job, or even on things like pain.”
This is why, Weir said, she was broadly in favour of implementing the government’s new value based pricing system (VBP), which is set to replace the current PPRS scheme by 2014.
Weir told Pharmafocus that she knows ‘with absolute authority’ that NICE ‘hides behind its statutory remit’ when appraising drugs.
She said VBP “goes beyond the current NICE framework by allowing value to be judged by additional social care and burden of disease costs that NICE does not currently take into account”.
But she also warned that VBP came with its own health warnings and could extend the time patients must wait for drugs as it effectively adds a new layer of bureaucracy to the system.
Any new system would need to be fully transparent and genuinely put patients at the heart of any process, she concluded.
Ben Adams
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