Pfizer Gives NHS Breast Cancer Drug Free
For as much as five months, US drugmaker Pfizer will provide its breast cancer drug palbociclib for free to the England arm of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). The decision comes after NHS’s. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which approves reimbursement for new treatments, provisionally rejected palbociclib because of its high cost.
Pfizer has said it will not charge patients for the patients for up to five months until a final decision is made by Nice and that patients already receiving the drug will be able to continue taking it for free even after that period.
British estimates say that around 6,000 people every year in the UK would be eligible for palbociclib, which is described as “ground breaking” and said to potentially prolong life for patients with metastases by an average of 10 months compared with existing treatments. With the offer, Pfizer told the UK newspaper The Independent it was acknowledging calls from physicians and patient groups for timely access.
The drugmaker said it believes women with metastatic breast cancer “deserve access as soon as possible to this innovative medicine that has been shown to significantly increase progression free survival, the length of time for which a patient’s disease does not worsen when used in combination with an aromatase inhibitor.”
According to Cancer Research UK, there were around 11,400 breast cancer deaths in the UK in 2014. In the same year, this was also the third most common cause of cancer death in the country.
