Medicine Innovation Bill a step closer in UK
pharmafile | October 20, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | BBC, DH, NHS, innovation bill, saatchi
A new bill proposed by Conservative peer Lord Saatchi has been given government backing as it seeks to become law in England.
The Medicine Innovation Bill is set to allow some terminal patients, such as those dying of cancer, to be voluntarily treated with unlicensed drugs in the hope this may help their prognosis.
The Bill has now been amended to require doctors to get the agreement of another specialist to prescribe the drugs, something that was not originally tabled. It is this safeguard that has led the Department of Health (DH) to give the Bill its support.
The DH says it is ‘minded to support’ its passage through the Lords and then go through the Commons before becoming law.
A Department of Health spokeswoman explains to the BBC: “Innovation is at the heart of modernising the NHS and is essential for improving treatments and finding new cures and work on the Medical Innovation Bill is ongoing.
“We are pleased that Lord Saatchi has tabled amendments to the bill to help ensure patient and staff safety.” One of its aims is to also encourage pharma companies to fund experimental drugs that only target a small number of diseases.
The bill would also give legal protection to doctors who want to try different procedures or treatments when they have exhausted other options. It will be debated by peers for the first time this week (Friday 24 October).
At its second reading in at Parliament earlier this year, Lord Saatchi said: “All cancer deaths are wasted lives.
“Scientific knowledge has not advanced by one centimetre as a result of all these deaths, because the current law requires the deceased receive only the standard procedure – the endless repetition of a failed experiment. The current law is a barrier to progress in curing cancer.”
Lord Saatchi has been campaigning on the issue since his wife, the author Josephine Hart, died of ovarian cancer in 2011.
Chequered past
Ana Nicholls, Healthcare Analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit, says: “The Medical Innovation Bill has had a chequered history as its supporters have tried to get it into law.
“According to those behind it, its main aim is to protect doctors from court cases if they try out an innovative treatment on their patients and it fails. But with patient groups and even the British Medical Association concerned that the original Bill didn’t offer enough patient safeguards, it has had to be reworked several times before gaining government support.
“From being a broad licence to try out innovative treatments, it is now restricted to cancers that would otherwise result in the patient’s death or other cases specifically sanctioned by the Secretary of State. This brings it far closer to the US and WHO provisions that allowed Ebola treatments such as ZMapp to be used in an emergency, because there was no other treatment available.
“That should help to allay many of the concerns raised by previous versions of the Bill, but there may still be concerns about the effect on formal clinical trials for advanced cancer treatments. At present, patients who want access to experimental treatments and are willing to take the risks usually sign up for clinical trials. Last year, around 600,000 people in the UK were recruited, according to the NIHR Clinical Research Network.
“But such trials rely on some patients receiving a placebo instead. If they can persuade their doctors to give them experimental treatments directly, then trial recruitment may drop. Nevertheless, the fact that so many patients are willing to enter trials does suggest that the demand for experimental medicines is very high, and that those facing death from cancer are likely to welcome the new Bill.”
Ben Adams
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