The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has issued a final guidance recommending that bosutinib (Bosulif), a tyrosine kinase inhibitor used to treat certain patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), be made available through the National Health Service (NHS).
This means patients will no longer have to apply to the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) to obtain bosutinib.
The CDF is money the government sets aside to pay for cancer drugs that haven’t been approved by NICE and aren’t available within the NHS in England.
Following the decision to reform the CDF earlier this year, NICE began to reappraise all drugs currently in the CDF in April. Bosutinib is the first drug to be looked at through this reconsideration process.
NICE previously considered making bosutinib available through the NHS in 2013 but decided the drug was not cost-effective. So bosutinib was made available to patients via the CDF.
As part of the reappraisal process, Pfizer offered a discount for bosutinib. Taking this discount into consideration, as well as the limited treatment options for CML patients, NICE decided bosutinib is cost-effective.
Bosutinib has conditional approval from the European Commission to treat adults with Philadelphia-chromosome-positive CML in chronic phase, accelerated phase, or blast phase, but only if those patients have previously received one or more tyrosine kinase inhibitors and are not considered eligible for treatment with imatinib, nilotinib, or dasatinib.
