4 October 2016 - Hundreds of people with lung cancer will now have access to new drug osimertinib, also known as Tagrisso, after NICE says it should be made available on the Cancer Drugs Fund.
Osimertinib which was only licensed in February this year is recommended in draft guidance to treat a particularly aggressive form of lung cancer.
Earlier this year, NICE said reforms to the CDF would help deliver faster access to effective cancer treatments. Osimertinib is the first drug to benefit from the new arrangements.
Professor Carole Longson, director of the health technology evaluation centre at NICE said: “For the first time, we are able to give patients access to a promising new cancer treatment whilst more evidence is gathered on its effectiveness. This is the system working as it should.”
A NICE appraisal committee first looked at the drug in May and concluded that although osimertinib had shown early promise, the long term benefits were unclear and it could not be considered cost effective.
After that decision, AstraZeneca who market the drug put forward newer evidence from ongoing studies as well as further analyses of the available data.
The NICE committee still felt that the new data was not strong enough to say for certain if osimertinib was value for money. As the studies were gathering more information on the long term effectiveness of osimertinib, they decided it could be included on the CDF.