The health secretary has promised to “look carefully” at calls from Baroness Jowell for cancer patients to be allowed to take the risk of undergoing innovative treatments on the NHS.
The former Labour minister, who is 70 and was told she had an aggressive brain tumour in May last year, told BBC Radio 4’s Today that there should be more opportunities for “adaptive trials”, in which patients could quickly move between types of treatment if a particular one did not prove effective. Her suggestions have been backed by a number of cancer research charities.
She will tell the House of Lords today that the NHS should share data with doctors overseas to speed up their research and produce treatments faster.
Only one in five patients suffering from glioblastoma survives more than five years, although tests of several new treatments offer patients hope.
Lady Jowell explained that treatments that were likely to be effective usually showed results early on. She said: “[Adaptive trials are] exactly the kind of risk that patients should be free to take, and it’s certainly what somebody like me wants.” She added that she was “absolutely 100 per cent” focused on staying alive and said she intended to seek experimental treatment in Germany. “I got to the point in the NHS in London where I couldn’t be given any more treatment but it was very clear that if I went to Germany then I had a chance of taking this immunotherapy — a new experiment,” she said.
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Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, wrote on Twitter: “Grace, courage & passion: what a moving interview with Tessa Jowell this morning. I’ll look carefully at her suggestions on cancer care & treatment.”
Sarah Lindsell, chief executive of the Brain Tumour Charity, which supports the development and funding of more adaptive clinical trials, said: “If you have been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour and given no hope of a cure, it is very difficult to understand why you shouldn’t be allowed to try new treatments or combinations of treatments that might extend your life . . . These tumours progress very quickly — there is simply not enough time for a patient to take part in different trials, each of which tests a single potential treatment.”
