Merseyside kidney cancer patients to be given fighting chance

Dec 28 2007 by Liza Williams, Liverpool Daily Post

70 people denied drugs in Merseyside

CAMPAIGNERS were last night celebrating after pri-mary care trusts in Mersey- side and Cheshire agreed to start offering a kidney cancer drug on the NHS.

Sutent, is a drug yet to be licensed by the National Insti-tute for Clinical Excellence, meaning PCTs are not obliged to offer it.

Until now, kidney cancer sufferers have had to rely on special treatment panels at PCTs allowing pleas for Sutent.

Even if consultants said a patient should receive it, there was no guarantee it would be offered by PCTs, who are obliged to factor in the drug’s cost-effectiveness as well as its likelihood of success.

Earlier this year, it was revealed Sutent was among the drugs which had been refused to patients by PCTs in Merseyside and Cheshire in the last 18 months.

PCTs in Merseyside said they deferred the decision on whether Sutent should be offered as standard medication to the North West Specialist Commissioning Team, a branch of the NHS based in Warrington, which had said it should be offered.

“The decision was taken by them on behalf of the PCTs,” said a spokesman for Wirral Primary Care Trust.

Other primary care trusts in the North West have yet to take such a decision, and the Merseyside and Cheshire PCTs are among the first in the UK to offer it without first seeking panel approval.

Prof Robert Hawkins, from the cancer specialist Christie Hospital, in Manchester, had been running trials with Sutent on patients, including Southport man Frank Buckle, who otherwise would have had to pay for it privately.

Prof Hawkins said: “We have been very impressed with Sutent at the Christie. It's a treatment, not a cure, but it's not only been better in terms of shrinking tumours and keeping people well, it gives people a better quality of life.

“In the future, we may not have to operate on patients who we would have needed to in previous years. Sutent is a good drug for a group of patients who do not have many options.”

Radio broadcaster James Whale, chairman of the James Whale Fund for Kidney Cancer, said: “Until now, people with advanced kidney cancer have had little hope of extended life. The availability of Sutent for the treatment of this form of cancer is testament to the importance of continued funding into research to help alleviate the suffering of these patients”.

Mr Buckle, 70, first received Sutent in 2005 and said it worked much better than other forms of treatment.

The company director said: “When you see the waste in the NHS, it is staggering there is still a system where they turn round and say ‘No, we can’t afford that’.”

NICE has yet to make a final decision on Sutent, but health minister Ann Keen warned: “It is for local PCTs to decide whether to make Sutent available to patients.

“It is therefore not acceptable for national health service organisa-tions to refuse to fund a treatment simply because it has not been appraised by NICE.”