NICE Deny Liver Cancer Patients Life Prolonging Drug

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) will not fund the Liver Cancer Drug Nexavar (also called sorafenib).  About 3000 patients a year suffer from terminal Liver Cancer of which around 700 could be treated with Nexavar. Liver Cancer has a very poor prognosis generally, with the time from diagnosis to death often being as short as 8 months.

Nexavar costs about £3000 per month to fund although the makers of the drug, Bayer, have offered to reduce this cost by 25%.  The average Liver Cancer patient who would have been eligible for treatment with Nexavar would have lived on average 2.8 months longer although Nexavar has been shown to extend life in some patients by up to 1 year.

NICE have chosen not to fund Nexavar on the grounds that it is too expensive and not value for money as it does not extend life long enough.  Last year, NICE changed its own guidance on drugs for rare Cancers and promised to give extra weight to the so called “end of life” criteria which would have brought the UK into line with most European countries. It appears that despite this new weighting Nexavar still will not qualify for funding.

Treating the 700 patients who would have been eligible to take Nexavar per year would cost around £7.7 million, to put that into perspective, the NHS budget for this year was over £104 billion.

NICE’s decision is still under review and the final guidance will not be given until January 2010.