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Future Access to ponatinib and bosutinib for patients resident in England

We are publishing letters sent to Jeremy Hunt, Minister of Health, and Simon Stevens, CEO NHS England, signed by ourselves and Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research, Leukaemia Care, CML UK Facebook group and UK CML blogger Kris Griffin.

The letter to Simon Stevens sets out the case for the retention of bosutinib on the list of Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) drugs for CML patients in England, and also argues for ponatinib to be made available, via the CDF, for any patient in England that falls within its licensed use providing their clinician thinks it appropriate and the patient agrees to treatment. This would allow CML patients resident in England to enjoy the same level of access CML patients in Wales and Scotland currently enjoy. There is a meeting of the decision making body, the CDF Panel, tomorrow to discuss the retention of bosutinib.

CMLSG will be attending and reporting back our observations although the decision will not be made public for some weeks. There was a Written Parliamentary Question answered by a Department of Health Minister on Monday that confirmed rumours that have been circulating for some weeks that there will be no new applications for drugs to enter the national CDF in the future (we think this would probably cover up to the end of March 2016 when the current CDF expires). This would effectively make ponatinib unavailable in England to all clinically qualifying patients who do not have the T315i mutation. NHS England will of course say a clinician can make an exceptional needs application for ponatinib treatment for an individual patient but the success rate to date of this type of application has been negligible.

We will wait until we hear the Panel’s decision about bosutinib before commenting further and will then report on the access environment for all CML treatments.

Finally, we would like to stress that all patients in England currently being treated by bosutinib or ponatinib via a successful application to the CDF will continue to be able to be treated with either drug until they or their clinician decides otherwise.

David