Responsible pricing in value-based assessment of cancer drugs: real-world data are an inevitable addition to select meaningful new cancer treatments.

Abstract

Recently, NICE was given the task of governing the Cancer Drug Fund (CDF) in the UK as the latter was criticized for allowing too many insufficiently tested drugs to be covered [1, 2]. The CDF was initiated in 2012, but immediately received criticism from several health economists because of the rather strict coverage criteria that are commonly used by NICE for most other health services in the NHS. This led to questions about the use of different reimbursement criteria (why have a different fund otherwise?) for expensive cancer drugs. Such a separate fund would potentially take away large amounts of the collective health budget. This led to questions about the use of different reimbursement..