Ponatinib approved for use in Scotland

Very good news today from the NICE equivalent in Scotland, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC), with ponatinib approved for use in Scotland in what are called all its licensed indications. That is: Ponatinib is available to adult patients with chronic phase, accelerated phase, or blast phase chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) who are resistant to dasatinib or nilotinib; who are intolerant to dasatinib or nilotinib and for whom subsequent treatment with imatinib is not clinically appropriate; or who have the T315I mutation. We at CMLSG are very happy with this decision and would like to thank the three CML patients who have been treated with ponatinib who very generously supplied us with accounts of their treatment for us to use in our submission to the SMC. Following on from the approval of ponatinib for the treatment of CML in Wales on the same basis as Scotland earlier in the year, this now leaves England as a glaring exception with ponatinib only available via a patient's clinician making an application based on the national Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) list which restricts approval only to patients with the T315i mutation. All other requests for treatment with ponatinib in England have to be made via a patient's clinician making a Individual Cancer Drugs Funding Request (ICDFR) which, as noted in last week's post on this subject, are highly unlikely to be successful. For details please use this link: https://www.scottishmedicines.org.uk/SMC_Advice/Advice/1032_15_ponatinib... We hope this situation will be remedied at some point in the near future and will do all we can to assist in achieving that goal.