Drug companies win Alzheimer's appeal against watchdog
Graham Steel
Friday, 02 May 2008 12:49 UTC
I’ve been following this one on and off for a year or so.
Nigel Hawkes from the Times has just written an article published today about yesterday’s Court of Appeal decision.
Cutting a long story short, “The ruling is the first case that NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, has lost in court. It means that in future it will have to be completely transparent in the way it reaches its decisions, revealing the inner workings of the computer models it uses to measure value for money.”
It will be interesting to see from happens from here.
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I read this story in The Guardian and the emphasis was completely different – that patients with mild Alzheimer’s can now receive Aricept, but might not be able to get a prescription for months.
Obviously it will be very interesting to have the workings of NICE thrown open, although the different reporting of this story is just as interesting!
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Actually the Times also had this angle, Helen, but Graham didn’t provide the link. Here it is. It was part of a feature spread in the print edition (which I read), and is in a “related article” box in the link Graham provides.
I think that both these additional stories do demonstrate, as you imply, Helen, that the ruling itself isn’t that much of a “victory” in my opinion. The ruling is that NICE has to make the parameters of its economic models available. This means in practice that the drug companies can get their hands on these methodologies, which I am sure makes them delighted as they can then “promote” their drugs even more than they do already, but does it make any difference to individual patients? -
@ Helen,
Thanks for flagging up the Guardian article which I had not seen. I know James Meikle very well and spoke to him just there.
Maxine. I have pages 6 & 7 (link to page 7) of the Times (2nd May) and can’t see any mention of Hawkes’s Aug 07 article :-( Thanks for the link though.
I completely agree that this ruling works in favour of Pharma and it’s well seeing that they threw A LOT of money at this issue. NICE will have to refund the costs to Pharma plus meet their own expenses.
Overall result would appear to be a seven figure sum going from UK tax-payers to Pharma who to boot now have a model to base future plans/decisions on.
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