RESTRICTIONS on a life-extending new drug for kidney cancer patients have been extended to Scotland. Health service providers in Scotland have been told not to fund the £23,000-a-year drug Sutent because it fails the cost effectiveness test.

The same drug has been denied to a number of patients in the North-East.

Last week The Northern Echo highlighted the contrasting fortunes of two advanced kidney cancer patients, Kathleen Devonport, 63, from Chilton, County Durham and Barbara Selby, from Richmond, North Yorkshire.

Mrs Devonport has been able to have treatment after an anonymous well-wisher donated £9,000 to cover the cost of Sutent. Mrs Selby was told by her consultant that the drug was not available on the NHS.

The guidance from the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC), which advises on NHS treatment in Scotland, has outraged doctors and patient representatives. They insist for many desperate sufferers with advanced disease, the drug is literally a lifeline.

With no similar treatment guidance yet being offered in England and Wales, it is feared many hospitals will be instructed not to provide Sutent on the NHS.

Broadcaster James Whale, founder of the James Whale Fund for Kidney Cancer, says: ''By deciding not to fund Sutent, the SMC has effectively issued a death sentence to the 660 patients living with kidney cancer in Scotland. Despite the overwhelming evidence supporting Sutent, doctors will be forced to say 'no' to patients who need access to this life-saving treatment."

Sutent, the brand name of the drug sunitinib, is a multiple warhead smart weapon designed to attack biochemical mechanisms involved in cell division and the growth of tumour-nourishing blood vessels. In the UK it is licensed as both a first and second line treatment for advanced and spreading kidney cancer - an especially deadly disease.

Fewer than five per cent of patients with advanced kidney cancer survive as long as five years and many die within months. Research has shown that compared with interferon-alpha, Sutent can lengthen progression-free survival from five to 11 months.

Sutent has not yet been reviewed by Nice and no appraisal is in the pipeline. Without Nice guidelines, primary care trusts in some parts of the country are willing to fund Sutent while others are not.

Professor Robert Hawkins, director of medical oncology at the Christie Hospital in Manchester, says Sutent was the "most notable advance in the treatment of kidney cancer for many decades".