People with incurable blood cancer have been dealt a “huge blow” after a treatment shown to increase remissions by over a year was pulled by the drugs watchdog as it was not deemed to be cost effective, i can report. Around 1,500 people with the blood cancer myeloma have benefited from a three-drug medication known as IsaPD since it was rolled out through the Cancer Drugs Fund in 2020. IsaPD is a combination of isatuximab, pomalidomide and dexamethasone.
It is aimed at patients with relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma whose cancer has returned three times. The treatment has been shown to improve remissions by more than 12 months and has been an important part of myeloma treatment since 2020. The fund provides NHS patients in England cancer drugs rejected by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) because they were not cost effective to be used on the health service.
The treatment was up for review by Nice to decide whether it should be made permanently available to patients across NHS in England and Wales. The NHS is legally obliged to provide medicines recommended by the watchdog. Until recently, Nice had used an “end-of-life modifier” – treatments that prolong the life of patients with less than 24 months to live – to decide whether a treatment was cost effective.
But this was replaced by a “severity modifier”, which can change the threshold for cost-effectiveness in appraisals as it introduces a weighting based on the number of yea.
