‘I can’t afford life-saving cancer therapy’

A CANCER patient has told how she feels she is being “left to die” because sh e i s not e l i g i bl e f or pot e nt i a l ly life-saving treatment on the NHS.

Gaidik Salmon says she has been told that her best chance of survival is “immunotherapy” treatment, which would cost around £100,000.

The drug she needs, Nivolumab, is not yet licensed for urothelial cancer, which is what Ms Salmon is battling, so her only hope is to pay for it privately.

The 50-year-old from West Hampstead said: “If I don’t have this treatment, I’m going to be in real trouble, I’m going to lose my life. I’m told it will cost £100,000 to have the treatment and I just don’t have it.”

Ms Salmon, who has been battling the illness, a type of cancer of the urinary to raise some money so that I can at least start the treatment,” she said. “But there’s no chance we have the money to pay for the rest of it.”

Ms Salmon, who worked in commercial property development before she was diagnosed, added: “I’m just shattered I can’t have this treatment on the NHS, it’s so upsetting. It’s a matter of life or death, it shouldn’t be this way.”

The NHS funds immunotherapy for some cancers, but it has not been approved for urothelial cancer. It is possible for hospital consultants to make special case “individual funding requests” for the drug, but these are rarely approved. An NHS England spokeswoman said: “Nivolumab does not currently have a UK licence for the treatment of bladder cancer.

“It is possible for clinicians to submit an Individual Funding Request for their patients to receive cancer treatments which have not been appraised by NICE or are not currently available via the Cancer Drugs Fund. In this case, no IFR has been received.”