NHS victory over drugs giants on blindness treatment

‘Ploughed back into care’

TENS of thousands of patients at risk of blindness will be able to get cheaper drugs after a landmark legal ruling.

Pharmaceutical giants Novartis and Bayer had taken 12 NHS groups to court to try to block use of Avastin.

But yesterday Mrs Justice Whipple, sitting in the High Court, dismissed the companies’ case on all grounds. The judgement allows the NHS to start using Avastin for patients with wet age-related macular degeneration, or wet AMD. At £28 per injection, Avastin is far cheaper than the current drugs in use – Novartis’s Lucentis at £742 a dose and Bayer’s Eylea at £816.

The 12 clinical commissioning groups from Cumbria and the North East involved in the case say they will save £13.5million a year as a result. Across the country the NHS could save hundreds of millions of pounds and the ruling paves the way for further use of off-licence drugs.

David Hambleton, of the South Tyneside commissioning group, said: ‘The money this will save can be ploughed straight back into delivering the very best care possible to our patients.’

Avastin was initially designed as a breast cancer treatment and is not licensed as eye medication by the European Medicines Agency. Novartis and Bayer claimed using it put patients at risk.

But Mrs Justice Whipple dismissed this claim, saying the NHS watchdog NICE had decided otherwise. ‘The NICE guideline settles the safety issue,’ she added.

Novartis said it would consider appealing. ‘This is a bad day for patients, doctors and the NHS,’ it said in a statement. ‘This ruling threatens to jeopardise a world-leading system that has protected patients for many years by ensuring medicines have been tested rigorously and carefully scrutinised for delivering value.’ Bayer claimed the ruling was a setback for public health.

Wet AMD, which affects about 70,000 Britons, starts when blood vessels grow across the retina, blocking vision.