Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
CANCER ‘CURE’ IS REJECTED BY NHS BECAUSE IT COSTS TOO MUCH
31,000 problem pupils ‘cut to boost tables’
A TREATMENT which “cures” blood cancers using the body’s own cells has been rejected as too expensive.
The NHS regulator NICE made the ruling on Yescarta, which has a list price of £287,000 in the US. The treatment involves taking some of the patient’s own white blood cells which are “re-engineered” and injected back into the body.
Kite Pharma said in clinical trials, 72% of the patients responded to Yescarta and
51% went into complete remission. The treatment targets an aggressive nonhodgkin STATE schools have excluded tens of thousands of badly performing pupils to boost league table standings.
Expulsion is meant to be a last resort and axing them to boost results is illegal. But lymphoma blood cancer diagnosed in around 4,800 people every year.
NHS England boss Simon Stevens has said the health service wanted to introduce such treatments but manufacturers needed to set “affordable prices”. Dr Alasdair Rankin, of the Bloodwise charity, called the Ofsted identified 300 schools with high drop-out rates.
There were 539,844 year 10 state pupils in 2016 but only 526,956 had results in league tables a year later. “Roll-outs” for the last two years were NICE decision “extremely disappointing”. He added: “There are people alive today who would not be here if they had not taken part in a clinical trial.”
Prof Raj Chopra, at The Institute of Cancer Research in London, said: “The technique is complex and expensive but it is also a major advance in cancer treatment that has cured some patients who would otherwise have died.
“If we’re going to see the therapy widely available on the NHS we need to find ways to reduce the costs.”
Kite Pharma said: “We believe we will soon be able to reach an agreement.” 9,237 and 9,136, meaning a total of 31,261 have dropped out of statistics since 2014.
Ofsted’s Matthew Coffey said it was not an acceptable way “to boost performance”.