According to a report in the FT, “Leading pharmaceutical groups are cutting back on clinical research in the UK, claiming insufficient commitment by the government and the National Health Service to support new drug development.”
Pfizer of the US, Roche of Switzerland and Merck-Serono of Germany are among the companies which have told the Financial Times they have, or will, reduce the number of British patients enrolled in trials to test experimental medicines for life-threatening diseases such as cancer.
The result, the companies claim, is that few patients in Britain are receiving “gold standard” treatment -- so there is too small a group against which to compare their experimental drugs.
Add this to the list of the negative unintended consequences of HTA/Comparative Effectiveness.
The drug companies are increasingly frustrated by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the government’s medicines advisory body, which on Wednesday handed them fresh setbacks by advising against NHS use of Pfizer’s Avastin and Merck-Serono’s Erbitux.
The warnings are a fresh embarrassment for the government, which has stressed its commitment to pharmaceutical research in the UK while imposing a fresh 5 per cost cut after unilaterally scrapping the existing price contract with industry only halfway through its five-year term.
Pfizer has already recently canceled UK participation in four clinical trials, including one for cancer, because it could not recruit sufficient patients who were taking the existing international “gold standard” approved drugs against which to compare with its experimental treatment.
NICE argues it approves most medicines and those that it has rejected have offered very limited value.
Really? Perhaps NICE should speak with
Brian Turner, (Oaks Green Mount, Rastrick, United Kingdom) 74, who suffers from wet age-related
macular degeneration in his left eye. He went blind in one eye after the NHS denied his request for Avastin. The NHS told Mr. Turner that treatment would only be approved
if his other eye became affected and
complete blindness was a risk.
Here's Brian telling his own story:
www.biggovhealth.org/testimonials/brian-turner/And what about
Dorothy "Dot" Griffiths (Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom), a
breast cancer patient who, in July 2005, organized the advocay group "Fighting for Herceptin" and successfully lobbied the British Parliament after the NHS refused her request for the life-prolonging drug Herceptin because of ... cost of treatment.
Here's a link to Dot's story:
http://www.biggovhealth.org/testimonials/dorothy-griffiths/ Here’s a link to the complete story in today’s Financial Times:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f0e08f2a-42ee-11dd-81d0-0000779fd2ac.html
For more such healthcare “horror stories,” click here:
http://www.biggovhealth.org/stories/
And here’s a link to a new op-ed in the Journal of Life Sciences on the topic of what government-run healthcare provides – or doesn’t:
http://www.tjols.com/article-694.html
It’s time to tell the truth about Big Government Healthcare.
