PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Breast Cancer: Drugs (6 January 2017)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, when his Department plans that patients will lose access to Kadcyla (trastuzumab emtansine) if NICE does not recommend that drug in its final appraisal determination; what estimate his Department has made of the number of patients who are eligible for the drug Tyverb (lapatinib); and what estimate his Department has made of the number of patients who are receiving the drug Tyverb (lapatinib) on the NHS.

Asked by:
Dame Siobhain McDonagh (Labour)

No patients will lose access to trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla) for treating HER2-positive, unresectable locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer after treatment with trastuzumab and a taxane on publication of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) draft final appraisal determination as this is not NICE’s final guidance, which is expected in March 2017.

Under the new arrangements for the appraisal and funding of cancer drugs that came into effect from July 2016, where final guidance from NICE does not recommend a drug that is currently available through the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF), no further routine funding will be available for patients to be prescribed the drug. Any patients who have been prescribed the drug during the time in which the drug was in the Fund will continue to receive the drug at the pharmaceutical company’s cost until the patient and their prescribing physician consider it appropriate to discontinue treatment.

Lapatinib (Tyverb) is no longer routinely commissioned for the treatment of locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer through the CDF. Applications for its use can be made through NHS England’s individual funding request process and no estimate has been made of the number of patients eligible to receive it through that route.

NHS England has advised that there may be a very small number of patients who accessed lapatinib when it was on the CDF and who are continuing their treatment until they and their clinician agree an appropriate time to stop.

Answered by:
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Conservative)
16 January 2017