{"id":428499,"date":"2026-02-16T10:38:17","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T10:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/428499\/"},"modified":"2026-02-16T10:38:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T10:38:17","slug":"nhs-drug-rules-killing-uk-life-sciences-says-pharma-boss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/428499\/","title":{"rendered":"NHS drug rules \u2018killing\u2019 UK life sciences, says pharma boss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recent changes to how the NHS evaluates new medicines do not go far enough and are \u201cslowly killing the life science sector in the UK\u201d, a drug company boss has warned. <\/p>\n

Johan Kahlstrom, president and managing director of Novartis UK and Ireland, said that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) had not done enough to modernise how it rates the cost effectiveness of new drugs.<\/p>\n

Novartis \u2014 whose Entresto medication is seen as the gold standard for heart conditions, and whose Kisqali drug dominates the market for early-stage breast cancer treatments \u2014 has reduced its UK presence over the past 15 years from seven locations to a solitary site in White City, west London. Its UK headcount has fallen from more than 4,000 to just 1,250 in the same period.<\/p>\n

\"Portrait<\/p>\n

Johan Kahlstrom has rounded on Nice<\/p>\n

Bosses at the Swiss company have blamed the cuts on being unable to sell its drugs to the NHS because of strict Nice rules on cost effectiveness, and they have repeatedly labelled the UK \u201cuninvestable\u201d. Kahlstrom attacked Nice for approving less effective medicines and blocking better, more expensive alternatives. <\/p>\n

He said: \u201cWe used to be a leading nation when it came to access to new innovations. Now we\u2019re falling to number ten in Europe \u2026 We are in reality missing out on opportunities to change people\u2019s lives, to reduce the burden on hospitals, to drive better productivity and growth in the economy \u2026 That school of thought is part of the problem that is slowly killing the life science sector in the UK.<\/p>\n

Nice\u2019s \u201cunwillingness to modernise its approach or update its [cost\u2011effectiveness] thresholds \u2014 unchanged for more than 25 years \u2014 is a key reason why the UK is now widely seen as uninvestable from a life sciences perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The medicines watchdog, sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care, approves drugs by balancing their cost against how many years of high-quality life they provide \u2014 a metric known as \u201cquality adjusted life year\u201d (QALY). <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Novartis\u2019s corporate centre in Elm Park, Dublin<\/p>\n

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Last December, the government announced that Nice cost effectiveness thresholds for drugs will rise in April, for the first time since the independent body was established in 1999. The level will increase from a cost of \u00a320,000 to \u00a330,000 for each year of quality life provided, to between \u00a325,000 and \u00a335,000. <\/p>\n

Kahlstrom said that while this was \u201can important first step\u201d, the thresholds needed to rise further to keep in line with inflation.<\/p>\n

However, the chief executive of Nice, Jonathan Benger, has called for a freeze in the cost-effectiveness threshold after the recent rise. He told the Financial Times last month that any further increase would have a \u201cdiminishing return\u201d and that the increase to the thresholds would result in only three to five more medicines being approved each year. <\/p>\n

Benger noted that if the government spent more on medicines, \u201cthey\u2019ve got to pay for that somehow\u201d, meaning a choice would have to be made about cutting other services or raising taxes. <\/p>\n

The government plans to double investment in new medicines from 0.3 per cent of gross domestic product to 0.6 per cent of GDP over the next decade, but Kahlstrom said he wanted to see a \u201cclear roadmap\u201d on how to get there. <\/p>\n

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About 9 per cent of healthcare spending in the UK goes on medicines, down from 11 per cent ten years ago. <\/p>\n

Sally Gainsbury, a senior policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust health and social care think tank, said: \u201cThe government has already committed to raising the Nice threshold in response to pressures from the US, and has said that will cost an extra \u00a31 billion a year by 2028-29, which appears to be a low-end estimate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government has also said it will not provide extra funding to cover that cost, which means resources will have to be diverted from other forms of care where patients are already waiting too long, such as elective procedures or GP appointments \u2026 The evidence shows those forms of care offer patients far greater benefit for each \u00a31 spent than the benefits patients get from expensive new medicines.\u201d<\/p>\n

The life sciences sector employs 126,000 people in high skilled jobs and contributes \u00a317.6 billion in direct gross value added annually to the economy, according to data from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. However, there are concerns within the industry that the life sciences sector is diminishing in the UK as companies such as MSD and Eli Lilly scrapped plans to build research centres in London last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recent changes to how the NHS evaluates new medicines do not go far enough and are \u201cslowly killing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-428499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}