1,800 will get cancer drug as NHS strikes deal to slash the price

‘Win for patients and taxpayers’

UP to 1,800 lung cancer patients a year will get a life-extending drug after a landmark deal was struck between the NHS and the maker.

Sufferers will be given pembrolizumab, which boasts an average survival time for patients of 20 months – eight months longer than chemotherapy alone.

The drug was initially priced at £84,000 per patient and would have cost the NHS more than £150million a year, if offered to all 1,800 sufferers.

This is well over the £20million limit which any one drug is allowed to cost the NHS, set by NHS England and the drugs watchdog Nice.

But both NHS England and Nice have agreed a deal with the London- based manufacturer MSD to slash the price. The details are being kept confidential, but the drug is unlikely to cost much more than £11,000 per patient as this would breach the £20million limit.

Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said: ‘This is another milestone in our rapidly improving modern NHS cancer care. This win- win deal for patients and taxpayers brings genuine innovation and proven survival gains to cancer patients across England.’

Meindert Boysen, director of the Centre for Health Technology Evaluation at Nice, said: ‘We have to make sure any new treatment we recommend works well and is a good use of NHS resources. Pembrolizumab is one of the first new cancer drugs to benefit from this flexible approach and it can now be used routinely in the NHS.’

The £20million threshold was agreed last year amid growing pressure on the health service’s finances.

If a new drug is likely to be too expensive, Nice and NHS England must try to agree a deal with the manufacturer to lower the price.

If the manufacturer refuses to do so, Nice and NHS England have to decide whether to offer the drug to a limited number of patients.

Recently, NHS England and Nice have clinched a number of deals with drug companies which have led to them slashing their prices so they can keep supplying the huge NHS market.

If firms keep prices high, drugs will be banned from the NHS and only available to the few patients who can afford them privately.

But if they reduce the costs they will be offered to thousands of patients and still generate a substantial profit – as they are cheap to manufacture. Last June, for example, they agreed a deal with Roche to allow a breast cancer drug, Kadcyla, to be offered to 1,200 women a year.

But this is the first such arrangement where, had the price not been slashed, the cost would have exceeded £20million a year.

There are 46,400 UK cases of lung cancer a year and 35,600 deaths, making it the biggest cancer killer.

The average survival rate is far lower than for other types of cancer, with only 5 per cent of patients still alive five years after diagnosis.

But a new class of treatments called immunotherapy – which includes pembrolizumab – has shown huge promise.

Immunotherapy treatments turbocharge the body’s immune system so it can fight the cancer cells.

However, only patients with a certain genetic type of lung cancer will benefit from pembrolizumab.

This week a trial presented at the American Society for Clinical Oncology cancer conference in Chicago showed the drug enabled patients to live for an average of 20 months, compared to 12 months on chemotherapy alone, researchers from the University of Miami found.