Up to £340 million has been made available through the Innovative Medicines Fund to fast-track the most promising medicines to patients.
Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said: “I want NHS patients to be the first in the world to access the most promising and revolutionary treatments that could extend or save their lives.”
The fund will support NHS England in offering patients potentially transformative new drugs while further real-world evidence is collected to inform a final decision by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) on whether the treatment is clinically and cost effective, reducing delays and boosting patient outcomes in the interim.
Our Director of Research, Policy and Innovation, Dr Karen Noble said: “Accelerating access to potentially life-saving treatments is particularly critical for brain tumour patients, many of whom do not have the luxury of time. We welcome the launch of this fund and hope that brain tumour patients will be amongst those benefitting from quicker access to novel treatments.
“The fact remains, though, that for brain tumour patients these new therapeutic options just haven’t been available. The route to clinical innovation and new therapeutics remains underpinned by appropriate funding of early-stage discovery research, such as that which Brain Tumour Research funds at its Centres of Excellence. That begins the translational pipeline and that is how we will find a cure.”