Research indicates that society does not support the prioritisation of cancer drugs over other treatments. The
Financial Times attacked the fund in December 2014 as "a populist gesture that gives the impression of benefiting patients, but in fact rewards poor quality drugs while benefiting a handful of pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the taxpayer and the full range of NHS patients", complaining that it undermined the
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
James Le Fanu writing in
The Daily Telegraph said "This mechanism for diverting taxpayers' money to enhance, to little or no purpose, the profits of
Big Pharma might be more aptly named "the Drug Company Fund"." In February 2015 York University researchers reported that the fund represented particularly poor value, diverting money from other patient services and that for every healthy year gained by this fund, five
QALYs could be lost across the NHS. In December 2014
Andy Burnham announced that a Labour government would replace the fund with a Cancer Treatment Fund which would pay not only for innovative cancer drugs, but also for surgery and radiotherapy. It could mean increased access to advanced forms of radiotherapy such as intensity modulated radiotherapy and stereotactic ablative radiotherapy. In July 2015 the independent cancer taskforce established by NHS England proposed reform of the fund, which the taskforce said was "no longer sustainable or desirable… in its current form". Professor
Karl Claxton, a
health economist at the
University of York, says that the fund should be scrapped because the money would be better used on 21,000 patients with heart, lung and gastro-intestinal diseases who are denied cost effective evidence based treatment, arguing that the principal beneficiary of the fund is '
big pharma'. In September 2015 the
National Audit Office reported that no data had been collected on the 74,000 patients whose treatment had been funded, at a cost of nearly £1 billion, so it was impossible to discover whether the treatment had been effective. The
Public Accounts Committee published a report on the fund in February 2016 which concluded that there was no evidence the fund was benefiting patients, extending lives or a good use of taxpayers' money. Prof Richard Sullivan, of
King's College London and Dr Ajay Aggarwal of the
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine published a study in the
Annals of Oncology in April 2017. He concluded that the initiative as initially established was a "huge waste of money" and a "major policy error". The researchers studied the 47 treatments that were being funded by January 2015, of which only 18% met internationally recognised criteria for being deemed clinically beneficial. For those drugs where there was some evidence of benefit, the average was an extra 3.2 months of survival. The majority of patients were exposed to unpleasant side effects for no benefit. £1.27 billion was spent on the fund during the period studied. No usable data was collected on what happened to patients whose treatment was funded - such as measuring how long they lived, their quality of life or side-effects. There was no consideration of the relative merits of surgery and radiotherapy. After its July 2016 reform, Eifiona Wood and Dyfrig Hughes from the Centre for Health Economics and Medicines Evaluation at
Bangor University criticised decisions made by NICE on Drugs financed by the Cancer Drugs Fund for their lack of transparency, with decisions being made without disclosing ICERs (
Incremental cost-effectiveness ratio) or total spending. They claim that this goes against NICEs own policy guidance and risks undermining its integrity. Research, funded by the pharmaceutical industry, reported that the first 24 drugs to transition through the CDF did not generally use additional real world data as had often been proposed. Clinicians have argued that there is insufficient use of Real World Data to evaluate the effectiveness of all new cancer treatments. == See also ==