English cancer patients denied tumour-blasting drug available to Scots

LUNG cancer patients in England and Wales are being denied a ‘ground-breaking’ drug that could give them years more life – despite the fact it is available in Scotland.

Nivolumab has been shown to nearly double short-term survival rates in patients with advanced lung cancer. Doctors hope it could help some patients with the disease – who typically survive a matter of months after diagnosis – live years longer.

The drug, which makes cancer cells more visible to the immune system, has even been credited with bringing some patients back to health who were ‘on the brink’ of death.

Last month the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) approved it for use in patients with a type of the disease called advanced squamous non-small cell lung cancer, which kills around 6,000 people a year in the UK. But those south of the border will not benefit from the drug – which costs £63,200 to administer to one patient for a year – after the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) decided it was ‘not cost effective’. Experts say nivolumab, which NICE has approved for patients with advanced skin cancer, is the biggest step forward in the fight against lung cancer for 20 years.

Professor Dean Farrell, an NHS oncologist in Leicester, said: ‘We have had patients who were on the brink, without any other treatment option, receive this drug and are now well – and I mean as close to normal life as you can imagine – a year later. This is not a rarity.’

Dr Marianne Nicolson, of the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, said the SMC’s decision marked ‘a major turning point for lung cancer care in Scotland’.

Nivolumab has also been approved for use in Germany, Sweden and Greece. Lung cancer patient Fiona Fail, a mother of five, will not be getting nivolumab – because she lives in Blyth, Northumberland, just 60 miles from the Scottish border.

Mrs Fail, 59, has been told she could have as little as eight months left to live. She cannot understand why English patients were not getting access to the drug, when Scottish patients in her situation were.

‘It just seems so unfair,’ she said. ‘Everybody in Britain who needs nivolumab should be able to get it, not just people in Scotland.

‘Why is it deemed cost effective there, but not here? Will somebody from Parliament come up to tell my family why my life is worth less than somebody’s in Scotland?’

Dr Greystoke, her consultant medical oncologist at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, said: ‘I share Fiona’s frustration.’

He added that new drugs such as nivolumab were more effective and associated with a better quality of life than drugs currently being used in England such as the chemotherapy drug docetaxel. He believes that the SMC had given greater weight to trial results suggesting nivolumab could extend some patients’ lives by years than NICE had.