Hello Graeme-m,

The Science team wanted to pass on their response to your post. Please see below: 

"At the moment, abiraterone is available for men with advanced prostate cancer in England and Northern Ireland and men with high-risk prostate cancer in Scotland and Wales.

Taking a new drug all the way from an idea in a lab to patients costs millions of pounds. We have to work with pharmaceutical companies and combine expertise and resources in order to get the lifesaving discoveries developed by our scientists into the hands of cancer doctors and patients.

Once our researchers have identified a promising new drug in the lab, we provide the expertise, infrastructure and funding to help our researchers take this drug through the necessary lab testing and into ‘first in man’ clinical trials. These ‘first in man’ trials involve a small number of patients. However, due to the enormous cost and resource implications, we need the pharmaceutical industry to take promising new drugs further into large-scale trials.

We simply can’t afford to run large-scale drug manufacturing facilities or pay the multi-million pound costs required to take new treatments all the way through late-stage clinical trials and legal regulatory processes. It certainly wouldn’t be an effective use of our supporters’ donations to effectively set ourselves up as a pharma company.

New drugs must go through these rigorous clinical trials to ensure they are safe and effective. It is then down to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to decide whether the drug becomes available on the NHS.

NICE weigh up the benefits of a new treatment against its cost, compare this to what’s already offered by the NHS, and make recommendations on whether they consider the new treatment ‘value for money’. We’ve written a lot about the politics and economics of cancer drugs, and the need for a system that properly reflects cancer patients’ needs. 

Regarding screening for prostate cancer, there is currently no national screening program because the only current option, the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, is not accurate enough. We helped fund a study (called BARCODE1) to develop a new saliva test for identifying men at high risk of prostate cancer. This saliva test is now being analysed alongside other potential screening options as part of the ongoing TRANSFORM trial, which aims to find the best way to screen men for prostate cancer."

Moderator Anastasia