Innovative Medicines Fund launched to fast-track drugs

Patients in England can get early access to more cutting-edge medicines through a new fund.

The Innovative Medicines Fund (IMF) works like the existing Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF), fast-tracking promising treatments, even if they are expensive and have not yet been approved for routine NHS use.

It will cover potentially life-saving drugs for rare and genetic diseases.

The government has allocated up to £680m a year to be shared by the funds.

The IMF, like the CDF, will mean a newly approved medicine could be prescribed immediately, before final recommendations on it are drawn up by the advisory body that weighs the cost versus benefit of drugs used by the NHS - an organisation called NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence).

Patients would be able to access the treatment while data is collected for NICE to determine whether the medicine is affordable and effective enough to offer more widely.

A similar fund for innovative treatments - the New Medicines Fund - already exists in Scotland.

Wales has a New Treatments Fund that helps pay for high-cost drugs which have been recommended as cost-effective by NICE.

Experts hope funds like these will improve the lives of many who might otherwise miss out.

For example, approving treatments for rare conditions can be challenging, as the number of patients affected by a single rare disease is small.

The IMF offers a potential solution to this problem, giving patients the opportunity to have promising treatments fast-tracked, and, in turn, increasing the amount of data available to NICE for future decisions.

In the last year, NHS England has successfully negotiated deals for a range of new treatments, including drugs which may allow toddlers with spinal muscular atrophy the chance to walk.

The one-off gene therapy treatment Zolgensma, which has been described as the world's "most expensive" drug, with a list price of £1.79m, has been successfully given to a few young children through managed access agreements.

Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid, said: "I want NHS patients to be the first in the world to access the most promising and revolutionary treatments that could extend or save their lives.

"The launch of the Innovative Medicines Fund delivers another manifesto pledge and will fast-track cutting-edge medicines to adults and children, to give people renewed hope for a better future."