Tessa’s £240,000 cancer skull cap

DAME Tessa Jowell is using a pioneering £240,000-a-year device to tackle her deadly brain cancer. It takes the form of a ‘skull cap’ carrying an array of electrodes that fire minute electrical currents into the head to try to destroy her tumour.

Dame Tessa, 70, was wearing the device, below, under her hat when she addressed the House of Lords in a moving speech in January.

The treatment is provided on compassionate grounds through the NHS with costs covered by Novacare, the company that makes the device.

Dame Tessa, former Labour Culture Minister, has been fighting the deadliest of brain cancers, glioblastoma, for almost a year. Average survival rate is little more than a year, and it has been discovered that her mutant form fails to respond to chemotherapy.

She is being treated with the device, called Optune, at London’s Charing Cross Hospital, by neuro-oncologist Matt Williams and is one of just a handful of patients using it.

About 4,000 people a year in the UK develop glioblastoma, with Dr Williams estimating that the Optune device could help to buy more time for 1,000 treatment-resistant patients such as Dame Tessa.

A trial of 700 people found that after two years of treatment, 43 per cent of patients receiving Optune electrode therapy alongside the chemotherapy drug temozolomide were still alive, compared to 30 per cent of patients treated with temozolomide alone. At five years, survival rate was 13 per cent compared to five per cent.

In her Lords speech, Dame Tessa argued that brain-cancer treatments in the UK were not as good as in the rest of Europe, and called for better access to the latest treatments.

Dr Williams says Optune is not a cure and the current costs are prohibitive. ‘The device costs £20,000 a month to rent. The NHS wants to use it but we have to find a more economic model of treatment.’