From 26.5 million to 50.6 million euros: this is how much the National Health Service (NHS) is estimated to be able to save every year thanks to the compassionate use of medicines (CUP) programs funded by the pharmaceutical industry, used on patients suffering from serious diseases that do not qualify to enter the experimental phase. The figure, never calculated before, emerged from an analysis by Cergas SDA Bocconi, carried out in collaboration with Roche Italia and conducted by Claudio Jommi and Marianna Cavazza.
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Compassionate drug use programs are a tool that allows early access to new treatment options for those patients with serious medical conditions, rare diseases, rare cancers or life-threatening conditions for which they are not there are viable therapeutic alternatives available. They therefore represent an important opportunity first of all for patients, but also for clinicians and for the whole system. The analysis on the savings for the NHS was carried out on 12 CUPs activated by Roche from 2016 to today (of which 9 referred to oncological pathologies), in which 2,713 patients were treated. The net economic effect was estimated as the difference between the costs that the NHS would have incurred for any treatment against him and the costs he incurred for the CUP, represented by the costs of the drugs taken in combination with those provided in CUP, by uncovered diagnostic procedures and the management of any adverse effects of therapies.
According to the authors, the overall annual savings are included, depending on the drugs potentially used in clinical practice, from 26.5 million to 50.6 million euros. A saving that could actually be underestimated – they explain – as “the costs of side effects associated with the use of alternative drugs to those used in CUP have not been included. “This first evidence – Jommi and Cavazza conclude – provides an objective snapshot of the economic effects for the NHS. The estimate of the economic impact could be further integrated by the effects on the costs generated by the different efficacy between the drug in CUP and the possible therapeutic alternative “.
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