(Bloomberg) -- AstraZeneca Plc Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot has a warning for Britain’s new Labour government: improve access to innovative pharmaceuticals or life sciences companies won’t invest in the country.
Soriot warned Thursday that if the UK doesn’t change the way it assesses new drugs such as Astra’s cancer treatment Enhertu, patients will continue to miss out and other drugmakers with looser ties to Britain will take their money elsewhere.
His comments concern how the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence scores diseases based on their severity. NICE, as it is known, makes recommendations to the health service on the value for money that new drugs provide.
In the case of Enhertu, which treats a type of metastatic breast cancer, the disease is scored as moderately severe.
“If all of those diseases are scored moderately severe, basically access to innovative new medicines will totally shrink in the UK and as a consequence of course, patients will get hurt and the industry will invest less and less,” he said on a call with reporters.
While Britain has deep expertise in science, Soriot argued that barriers to access for patients are too high. “Developing medicines in a country doesn’t really make a lot of sense if it’s not very attractive, if you know patients will not benefit,” he said.
Britain’s new Labour government has pledged to boost economic growth by making the country more attractive to investors, after winning a landslide election victory earlier this month.
Enhertu, the breast cancer drug from Astra and Daiichi Sankyo Co., is already used in the state-run National Health Service to treat patients with high levels of a protein called HER2 in breast tumors.
However, NICE earlier this year decided not to recommend it for advanced HER2-low breast cancer — an advanced, late-stage form of the disease — in England and Wales. Scotland gave the go-ahead for the drug in December.
If the methodology used by NICE scored the specific type of metastatic breast cancer as a severe disease, “then the price we’ve offered would automatically lead to a positive recommendation for reimbursement,” said Soriot. “The methodology needs to be adjusted and patients need to get access to the medicines that can really change their life.”
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
