NICE comes out fighting against appraisal delays story
pharmafile | May 17, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Daily Mail, Dillon, NHS, NICE, Pfizer, Victrelis
NICE has criticised a report that says the watchdog has taken up to nine years to appraise certain drugs.
The report by the Office of Health Economics, which was commissioned by Pfizer, says that it takes on average five years for NICE to recommend a drug after it had been launched by the manufacturer.
The report came out in January this year and looked at the appraisal timings of NICE between 2000 and 2010.
The report said that the worst average delay for multiple drugs recommended by NICE came in 2005, when it took nearly nine years to make a decision on several chemotherapy drugs.
This was picked up by the UK tabloid the Daily Mail yesterday, which ran a large news piece on the findings.
But NICE’s chief executive Sir Andrew rebuked both the report and the Daily Mail’s article, and took to NICE’s website to offer a correction.
Sir Andrew said: “NICE has never taken nine years to make a recommendation to the NHS on the use of a new drug.
“The gap between a new drug becoming available to prescribe and NICE guidance being published is around five months.
“The study, on which [the Daily Mail’s] article was based, included drugs that were licensed for use, in some cases, more than five years before NICE was established.
“Its conclusions are both misleading and unhelpful for those who rely on our advice.”
Stephen Whitehead, the chief executive of the ABPI, agreed with Sir Andrew, and said at this week’s NICE conference in Birmingham that he ‘didn’t recognise the figures’, and dismissed the story.
A NICE spokesperson told Pharmafocus: “NICE works hard to ensure the NHS has access to robust guidance for medicines as quickly as possible.
“The speed of production targets we have agreed with the Department of Health relate to the part of the appraisal process that NICE can control – the period of time between a treatment being licensed and the publication of first draft guidance by us.
“We aim to achieve this within six months for the vast majority of our single technology appraisals.
“There are many elements to the appraisal process that we cannot control, all of which can lengthen the time it takes to publish guidance, particularly late notification of changes to regulatory approval timescales.”
The spokesperson said that appeals and other legal challenges may be lodged; pharma companies might submit patient access schemes partway through an appraisal; or further research might be requested.
“We recognise that all these factors are a legitimate part of the appraisal process, but we don’t think they are a fair reflection of the time that NICE takes to appraise a drug,” the spokesperson concluded.
In recent years the watchdog has made a concerted effort to speed up its appraisal times, something the report does not take into account.
In April, NICE expedited the review of two new hepatitis C pills – Janssen’s Incivo and MSD’s Victrelis – which saw them by-pass the preliminary stages of the appraisal process and become recommended months ahead of schedule.
Ben Adams
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