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Eisai: reform NICE or we’ll pull out of the UK

pharmafile | October 21, 2013 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing Eisai, Hatfield, Hunt, NICE 

Eisai has criticised NICE for being too narrow minded on assessing new drugs, and has warned it may pull its investment in the UK if it isn’t reformed.

The Japanese company which has recently invested £100 million in a new European HQ and factory in Hatfield, UK, said NICE was acting ‘as a block’ on new drugs being launched in here.

This has indeed been a major bugbear for all of pharma but Yutaka Tsuchiya, the deputy president of Eisai, has come out publicly saying NICE’s list of factors when coming to judgements on which drugs to approve is too limited.

“When we meet your government and talk to Jeremy Hunt [the health secretary], we tell him that unless you improve this, we will withdraw our investment in the UK,” Tsuchiya warned.

He would like to see instead different criteria used, such as quality of life measurements for new drugs, a medicine’s value to society, economic benefit and levels of innovation he says should be considered.

This is what the government will hope to bring into place next year with its value-based pricing (VBP) scheme, which is set to use these criteria when assessing new drugs.

But the picture has become less clear since the plans were published in 2010, as NICE was meant to be downgraded and its use of the QALY formula to assess a drug’s cost-effectiveness removed.

But NICE remains intact as the only health technology assessor in England, and plans for VBP have been delayed until next September according to news reports. VBP also remains an enigma for the industry as details of just how it will work have not yet been ironed out, despite the fact that its original roll-out date was for this coming January.

This has left pharma in an unclear position, but overall it looks as if NICE will continue as the main arbiter of NHS drug funding in England for the future. 

Eisai has had bigger battles with NICE. In 2007 the Institute’s rejection of its Alzheimer’s drug Aricept (developed with Pfizer) was challenged in the High Court, and became a watershed for NICE when Labour ministers starting asking questions as to why these relatively cheap drugs were not being pushed through.

The drug remained unavailable on the NHS until NICE had a change of heart in 2010, and recommended it along with a number of other Alzheimer’s treatments. Aricept is now being sold as a generic in the UK after it lost its patent early last year. 

On his list of grievances Tsuchiya also pointed out that investing in Britain was four times as expensive as investing in India where Eisai also has a major factory.

Tsuchiya said added that Hunt had been ‘very open’ to what he said and that current investment was not under threat.

Ben Adams

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