Revlimid can extend the lives of patients with an aggressive cancer of the bone marrow by up to three years, but draft guidance from the UK’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence has said it is not cost effective and the estimate of three years of extra life was disputed, The Telegraph reports.

The med is used to treat Myeloma, an incurable bone marrow cancer that cuts production of red and white blood cells. An estimated 20,000 people in the UK have the disease and each year around 3,800 new cases are diagnosed. The cancer has a high mortality rate, claiming more than 2,400 lives a year. But Revlimid costs $56,400 per patient per year and breaches the cost effectiveness threshold used by NICE more than twice over, the paper writes.

Charities are now calling for the drugmaker and the Department of Health to broker a deal so the Revlimid can be used on the National Health Service. A so-called risk sharing scheme is already in place for another multiple myeloma drug, Velcade, where the NHS only pays for the treatment in patients who can be shown to respond and where it does not work the treatment stopped and the cost refunded by the manufacturer, according to the paper.

Celgene could agree to a sliding discount which increases the longer a patient survives, offer of one or two free courses of treatment or a price cut, The Telegraph notes.

Professor Gareth Morgan, consultant haematologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London and Surrey and president of Myeloma UK, tells the paper that “this decision will have a devastating impact on patients with multiple myeloma as it could result in patients being denied additional years of life. Revlimid offers new hope for cancer patients as it represents a major step forward in turning the blood cancer, multiple myeloma, into a chronic and manageable disease rather than the death sentence it has been until now.”

But Professor Peter Littlejohns, Clinical and Public Health Director at NICE says that “the independent advisory committee did not accept the manufacturer’s claim that (Revlimid) is cost effective because it felt that they had over estimated the extension to life expectancy gained with lenalidomide treatment.

“If these treatments were provided on the NHS other patients would lose out on treatments that are both clinically and cost effective. The Institute will consider any pricing scheme proposed by the manufacturer once they have been reviewed and considered suitable for the NHS, by the Department of Health.”

Source: The Telegraph