OVER the past few weeks five new treatments have been made available to cancer patients in the North-East.

At its recent meetings, the North of England Cancer Drug Approvals Group (NECDAG) agreed to applications from cancer doctors for treatments for skin, bone, blood, breast and ovarian cancers.

The new treatments are:

• Vemurafenib, a new and extremely expensive drug for people with advanced skin cancer;
• Denosumab, for people with breast and prostate cancer whose disease has spread to the bones;
• Rituximab, for people with a form of blood cancer;
• Eribulin, for people with advanced breast cancer;
• Bevacizumab (Avastin), for women with ovarian cancer.

Of the above drugs, Rituximab is being funded through Primary Care Trust budgets and the remainder through the cancer drug fund allocation received from the government. This follows the announcement last year that the North- East would receive £11.3m to spend on cancer drugs not funded by the NHS during 2011/12.

Ken Bremner, chairman of NECDAG and chief executive of City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Where there is strong evidence to show clinical benefits from new cancer treatments we continue to make the cancer treatments available using mainstream NHS funding.

“However, the additional money from the government means that across the region there are hundreds of patients benefiting from new cancer drugs that the NHS would not have been able to fund previously.

“Before we had this additional money for cancer drugs we had to make very difficult decisions about the funding of expensive treatments which we know offer only a limited extension to life and sometimes which have shown relatively small clinical benefits.

“One of the drugs we have just approved – Vemurafenib – is a new and very expensive drug which has shown impressive results in those who have received it. I am pleased it is now available to patients in this region.

“We recognise how important it is to patients and their families to have access to these treatments and know that these decisions are very much welcomed by clinicians as well as by patients and their families.”

Doctors working in cancer care will continue to bring applications for new treatments that have not been considered by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to NECDAG.

Those that do not meet the criteria for mainstream NHS funding will be considered for funding by NECDAG.

Drugs recommended as clinically and cost effective by NICE will continue to be funded by the NHS.

NECDAG has set up arrangements to closely monitor the use of the new treatments against the money available.

NECDAG is a subgroup of the North of England Cancer Network that includes doctors and other professionals working in cancer care.

Serving a population of more than three million, the group considers applications for drugs that are not in the NICE system and also those drugs which are more than six months away from being considered by NICE.