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4th March 2019
1st March 2019
28th February 2019
NHS prescriptions are set to rise by 20p per item from 1 April 2019, the Government announced on Thursday (21 February).
The raise from £8.80 to £9 will apply to each medicine or appliance dispensed, while the cost of prescription pre-payment certificates (PPC) has been frozen for a year at £29.10 for a three-month PPC and £104 for a 12-month PPC.
PPCs are available for patients who require four or more items in three months or more than 12 in a year.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said that “taken together, this means prescription charge income is expected to rise broadly in line with inflation.”
Last year’s prescription charge increase of 20p – from £8.60 to £8.80 – was described by campaigner Prescription Charges Coalition as “catastrophic“.
It is hoped that the rise in charges will contribute towards the £22 billion in ‘efficiency savings’ the Government required of the NHS as part of the Five Year Forward View, adopted in the 2015 spending review.
The Five Year Forward View detailed that £22 billion of the predicted £30 billion NHS funding gap would be made up through efficiency and reform.
These savings are to come alongside the Government’s 2015 commitment to a £10 billion investment by 2020 to 2021 to fund “frontline NHS services”.
The DHSC said the savings would “secure the best value from NHS resources and primary care must play its part”.
Chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) English Board Sandra Gidley said: “The consequences of the relentless rise in prescription charges are well-known. If you can’t afford your medicines, you become more ill, which leads to poor health and expensive and unnecessary hospital admissions.
“Every day, pharmacists are asked by patients who are unable to afford all the items in their prescription which ones they could ‘do without’. Patients shouldn’t have to make choices that involve rationing their medicines. No-one should be faced with a financial barrier to getting the medicines they need.”
She added that prescriptions should be free in England as they are in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so that “no-one would have to worry about payment decisions affecting their health”.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) will spend around £11m on warehouse contracts to store medicines as a contingency measure for a no-deal Brexit, Hospital Healthcare Europeunderstands.
In October last year, health and social care secretary Matt Hancock told the Health and Social Care Committee that the Government had issued an invitation to tender for additional storage space to stockpile medicines.
The measure was implemented to ensure access to medicines in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
The DHSC told our sister publication Healthcare Leader that it “expects to spend around £11m on warehouse contracts to store medicines in preparation for a no-deal Brexit”.
In October, Mr Hancock said he was expecting the value of the contracts to be “in the low tens of millions of pounds”.
He was, however, unable to share a more precise figure and said the Government was buying the space ‘from the market’ and would in some cases have to build new facilities.
Last month, health minister Stephen Hammond said the Government had signed a contract worth around £1m to accommodate 5,000 pallets of cold medicines across the UK.
Questioned in Parliament last week, Mr Hancock was asked how much the DHSC has already spent on preparing for a no-deal Brexit ‘after activating NHS no-deal contingency plans’. He was also asked “what the overall bill for this will be”.
Diverging from what the DHSC told Healthcare Leader, Mr Hancock specified in Parliament that “around £11m has been spent already”, whereas the DHSC said it is money the department is expecting to spend.
The DHSC was unable to clarify the difference between the two statements at this point.
Mr Hancock said last week: “The NHS is not generally buying the extra medicines that are going into the elongated stockpiles but the pharmaceutical industry is because of course we’ll eventually buy most of those medicines for the NHS.
“So there have been costs in the pharmaceutical industry as well but the cost so far to the taxpayers is £11m and I expect it to remain around that level if not a little higher.”
Last year, Mr Hancock asked pharmaceutical companies to stockpile six weeks’ worth of medicines to prepare for the eventuality of a no-deal Brexit.
The UK is expected to leave the European Union on 29 March and at a press conference in Sharm-el-Sheikh yesterday (25 February) Prime Minister Theresa May said everybody should be focused on leaving with a deal by the set date. Her comments follows calls from MPs to delay Brexit day.
This story was first published by our sister title Healthcare Leader
27th February 2019
A UK-wide collaboration led by the University of Exeter and the Royal Devon & Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, part-funded by Crohn’s & Colitis UK and Guts UK, and supported by the NIHR has concluded that trials are needed to investigate whether early personalised dosing, guided by blood level monitoring, might help reduce the rate of treatment failure.
Published in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, the Personalised anti-TNF therapy in Crohn’s disease study (PANTS) followed 1610 patients with Crohn’s disease starting anti-TNF treatment at 120 UK hospitals – the largest cohort of its kind.1
The anti-tumour necrosis factor (TNF) drugs, infliximab and adalimumab are used to treat patients with moderate to severe Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis when other treatments have not worked.
Although anti-TNF drugs have given new hope for people with Crohn’s and Colitis, and provided an important treatment option, they do not work in some patients. The research looked at the factors involved in why treatment fails many people with Crohn’s disease. The PANTS study showed that about a quarter of patients had no response to the drugs and in one third of initial responders, the drug stopped working within the first year of treatment. Nearly 10% of people experienced harmful side effects that resulted in the treatment being stopped. Overall 37% of patients starting anti-TNF drugs were well and still on treatment at the end of the first year.
Anti-TNF drugs are large, complex molecules and repeated administration causes the immune system to recognise the drug as a potential threat rather than a medicine. This leads to the production of antibodies. These anti-drug antibodies block the action of anti-TNF drugs and increase the rate at which the drugs are removed from the body, reducing drug levels and the effectiveness of treatment. Findings from the PANTS study suggests that the risk of forming antibodies to anti-TNF therapy might be reduced by using personalised dosing particularly at the start of treatment, together with the use of a thiopurine or methotrexate drug alongside infliximab and adalimumab.
Introduced in the 1990s, anti-TNF drugs now rank in the top 5 NHS drug spend. However, in 2015 the introduction of a biologically similar version of infliximab, called CT-P13, was launched in the UK offering significant costs savings for the NHS. In the PANTS study, CT-P13 was shown to be as safe and effective as the original infliximab (Remicade).
Dr Tariq Ahmad, of the University of Exeter Medical School, who led the research, said: “The results from the PANTS study suggest there are opportunities to optimise the use of anti-TNF therapies to increase treatment effectiveness. In particular, our data suggests that early personalised dosing, guided by blood level monitoring, together with the use of thiopurine or methotrexate therapy, may help achieve optimal drug levels and minimise the risk of anti-drug antibody formation. We now have cheaper versions of infliximab and adalimumab which means that personalised dose intensification is now more affordable.”
Helen Terry, Director of Research, Crohn’s and Colitis UK said: “Anti-TNF drugs have been life-changing for many patients with Crohn’s, but we need to understand why this treatment doesn’t always work. Sometimes patients can go on a long journey to find the best medication for them, but this study means that personalised treatment could be implemented earlier. As well as improving patient outcomes, personalised dosing could also lead to cost-savings for the NHS.”
Julie Harrington, Chief Executive Officer of Guts UK, a charity committed to fighting digestive disorders, said: “These findings show the importance of personalising the treatment for patients with Crohn’s disease. Guts UK are delighted to have supported the early stages of this study.”
Reference
26th February 2019
A ground-breaking and large-scale NHS research collaboration, led by the University of Exeter and the Royal Devon & Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, has discovered a gene mutation that allows the identification of patients at risk of a drug side effect, allowing clinicians to tailor alternative treatments to these individuals.
The research, funded by the charities Crohn’s and Colitis UK, for Crohns, and the International Serious Adverse Event Consortium (iSAEC) and supported by the NIHR, has been published in JAMA.1 This finding will reduce the risk of drug side effects caused by treatment with thiopurines (consisting of azathioprine and mercaptopurine). This group of drugs is commonly used for the treatment of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis (collectively as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)) are incurable lifelong conditions that affect approximately 1 in 150 people in the UK. The main symptoms are urgent diarrhoea, often with rectal bleeding, abdominal pain, profound fatigue and weight loss. The condition disrupts people’s education, working, social and family life. Drugs to suppress the immune system are the mainstay of treatment; however, more than half of patients with Crohn’s disease and about 20% of patients with ulcerative colitis will require surgery at some point. The lifetime medical costs associated with the care of a person with IBD are similar to the costs of treating diabetes or cancer.
About a third of patients with IBD are treated with a thiopurine drug; however, approximately 7% of patients develop the adverse reaction of bone marrow suppression. This means that the body’s immune system is less able to fight infection and patients are at risk of sepsis.
Previous studies have identified mutations in a gene known as TPMT, which predisposes patients to thiopurine-induced bone marrow suppression. Clinicians either adjust the dose or avoid thiopurines altogether if routine tests show that patients are likely to carry faulty versions of the TPMT gene. However, only a quarter of patients who suffer from bone-marrow suppression have abnormalities in TPMT, suggesting that other genes may be involved.
Through the National Institute of Health Research Clinical Research Network, 82 NHS hospitals in the UK recruited patients to the study. In addition patients were recruited from international collaborators in the Netherlands, USA, Australia, France, New Zealand, South Africa, Malta, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Canada. The Exeter IBD Research Group also recruited UK patients via the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) Yellow Card Scheme, which collects reports of patients who have experienced complications of treatment.
DNA from approximately 500 patients with IBD that suffered thiopurine-induced bone marrow suppression and 680 controls (IBD patients who had received thiopurines and had no history of bone marrow suppression), were analysed to identify genes possibly associated with this adverse drug reaction.
The researchers found an association between mutations in a gene called NUDT15 and bone marrow suppression. This gene mutation had previously only been thought important in patients of East Asian descent.
Chief Investigator of the study, Dr Tariq Ahmad, of the University of Exeter Medical School, said: “In the largest genetic analysis into the side effects of thiopurine drugs we’ve discovered variation in a gene that can help us identify who is susceptible to thiopurine-induced bone marrow suppression. In line with the NHS 10 year plan to increase personalised medicine, testing for this genetic abnormality prior to prescribing thiopurine drugs will reduce the risks to patients, and costs to the NHS, associated with this potentially serious drug side effect.
“Working with patients and clinicians from across the UK, we have shown the power of the NHS to deliver clinically meaningful genetic research outcomes.”
The team found three different variants in NUDT15 that were associated with bone marrow suppression in European patients. Lead author Dr Gareth Walker added: “Personalising medicine according to a person’s genetics will hopefully allow doctors to treat their patients in a safer, more effective manner.”
“We hope that once a predictive test is developed, patients will be able to have a simple blood test before starting these drugs. This will allow doctors to modify treatments, either by reducing the dose or opting for different treatment altogether.”
Dr Matt Nelson, head of Genetics at GlaxoSmithKline and chair of the International Serious Adverse Event Consortium scientific committee, said: “We established the iSAEC as a non-profit biomedical research consortium, working with leading academic investigators to better understand the genetic risk underlying drug-induced serious adverse events. We are so pleased the discoveries from our collaborative research with Dr Ahmad and the IBD research network will make IBD treatment safer for patients.”
Reference
25th February 2019
Deleting a specific gene in mice alleviates arthritis symptoms and could be used to formulate a cure in humans, researchers have found.
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine found that deleting a gene called ELMO1 in mice reduced inflammation in acute and chronic arthritis models.1
This was particularly surprising because the researchers had hypothesised that deleting the gene would worsen inflammatory arthritis because it promotes cytoskeletal reorganisation during engulfment.
Studies revealed that ELMO1 works with receptors that are linked to neutrophil function in arthritis.
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