Liver cancer patients denied drug

12 April 2012

People with advanced liver cancer will be denied a new drug on the NHS under latest draft guidance.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) said the price being charged by pharmaceutical firm Bayer for the medicine was "simply too high" - treatment with the drug costs £36,000 a year per patient.

But cancer charities said it was a "scandal" that patients are being refused the only drug that has been shown to extend their lives.

Nexavar (also called sorafenib) is not a cure but has the potential to help people live longer, typically by six months.

Bayer, which offered a patient access scheme where the company would provide every fourth packet for free, said it will appeal the decision.

The drug is suitable for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which occurs when the cancer tumour originates in the liver rather than spreading there from elsewhere in the body. The only hope of a cure is surgery but very few patients are eligible for this.

More than 3,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with liver cancer every year and more than 3,200 die from the disease. Only around 20% of patients are alive one year after diagnosis, dropping to 5% after five years.

Andrew Dillon, chief executive of Nice, said: "We were disappointed not to have been able to recommend the use of sorafenib but after carefully considering all the evidence, including the proposed patient access scheme in which the manufacturer offered to provide every fourth pack free, sorafenib does not provide enough benefit to patients to justify its high cost.

"We have recently changed our approach to appraising high cost treatments which can extend life for terminally ill patients. This has meant that more of them are now being recommended. We looked at sorafenib in just the same way but the price being asked by Bayer is simply too high to justify using NHS money which could be spent on better value cancer treatments."

Mike Hobday, head of campaigns at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: "We are extremely disappointed that Nice has decided not to recommend sorafenib as a treatment for people with advanced liver cancer. It is a scandal that the only licensed drug proven to significantly prolong the lives of people with this devastating disease has been rejected, leaving them with no treatment options. It's time to rethink the way new cancer drugs are assessed to ensure fairer access to drugs for people with rarer cancers."

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