(Bloomberg) -- Eli Lilly & Co’s Alzheimer’s drug won’t be made available for patients using England’s National Health Service, after the drug cost regulator deemed its benefits were too small to justify the price.
It marks the second such rejection in the UK for an Alzheimer’s treatment, after Eisai Co. and Biogen Inc.’s drug met the same fate earlier this year.
Eli Lilly’s drug, donanemab, was approved by the UK’s medicines authority on Wednesday. However, draft guidance issued Wednesday by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which assesses the cost-effectiveness of new drugs, said the price of the medicine and the intensive monitoring needed outweighed the relatively small benefit it would provide to patients. It decided the drug was not good value for the taxpayer.
Clinical trials showed that donanemab slowed Alzheimer’s disease progression by four to seven months.
“The cost-effectiveness estimate for donanemab is five to six times above what NICE normally considers an acceptable use of NHS resources,” Helen Knight, director of medicines evaluation at NICE, said in a statement.
Similarly Eisai and Biogen’s Alzheimer’s treatment lecanemab is approved for use in the UK but NICE also declined to endorse the drug.
Both medicines are the first two drugs shown to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s and are infusions that remove toxic amyloid from the brains of affected patients.
The drugs only modestly slow the disease and are approved only for people with early-stage Alzheimer’s, a minority of the total patient population with the illness. Side effects of both include brain swelling and brain bleeding, meaning that close monitoring of patients is needed, including regular brain scans.
The decision was “disheartening,” said Fiona Carragher, chief policy and research officer at Alzheimer’s Society. Carragher said with diseases like cancer, treatments have become more effective, safer and cheaper over time. “We hope to see similar progress in dementia.”
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