LONDON, February 26, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- NICE will convene today after two years of delays, to exercise their final opportunity to reverse the fate of thousands of UK advanced primary liver cancer patients who were told in November that they will be denied their only survival option, Nexavar(R) (sorafenib) on the NHS. As the NICE panel convenes to hear the appeal from the drug manufacturer (Bayer Schering Pharma), RCF pleads with NICE to re-consider the evidence in favour of the drug, in order to avoid leaving thousands of UK patients with no treatment option at all and no hope as the process reaches its final stage.
Andrew Wilson-Webb, Chief Executive of the RCF said: What happened to the recommendations from the Richards Review in November 2009 and the new End of Life policy from NICE? These policies were specifically designed to help patients with rarer cancer such as Liver to access new treatments for a previously untreatable disease. We can only hope that NICE take this final opportunity to allow advanced liver cancer patients the chance they deserve to potentially benefit from this drug.
Liver Cancer cases have more than tripled in the last 30 years from 865 cases in 1975 to more than 3100 in 2006, but because HCC is symptom silent, most of the time people go untreated until it's too late for surgery. For such patients, Nexavar is the only option. Currently, the UK is the only country in the western world to refuse patients access to Nexavar, despite it being widely available for both kidney and liver cancer in the US and every single other country it is licensed in, from Germany and France to Poland and Romania.
Andrew concludes Sadly, although NICE was established to ensure that effective, innovative drugs are funded by the NHS, it seems to have instead become a gatekeeper to protect the NHS budget and people with the rarer cancers in particular, seem to be losing out. One has to question how many lives could have been saved in the two years NICE took to assess the treatment and how much financial waste was incurred during this time, that could have been used to fund patients with sorafenib (Nexavar). The larger question is of course what kind of impact such decisions by NICE will have on the future of medical science in the UK?
About the Rarer Cancers Forum
The Rarer Cancers Forum is a unique charity which directly supports patients who have a rarer cancer with bespoke information, and provides more general education materials. The charity works to educate health professionals about rarer cancers and to improve the services for those with rarer cancers by working directly with Government, NICE and the Department of Health. Rarer Cancers Forum is the only in the UK solely concerned with looking after this large group of patients who may have one of 176 different tumour types, all classified as less common cancers.
SOURCE: Rarer Cancers Forum
CONTACT: Contact for further information: Andrew Wilson-Webb, ChiefExecutive, Rarer Cancers Forum, Tel: +44(0)1227-738279, Mob:+44(0)7973118290
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