George Freeman

The Early Access to Innovative Medicines scheme will make us healthier for longer

Imagine this: you take a routine trip to the doctors. Except it doesn’t turn out to be routine at all. Instead, the doctor tells you that you only have months to live. Worse still, there is no certified cure. There is a potential drug that could save your life, but it’s stuck in a regulatory tangle, waiting for approval which takes years. It might come on the market in a decade. But by then, of course, it will be too late for you.

Ludicrous, surely? Yet that has been the dilemma facing too many over recent years, unable to get access to the drugs that could save their lives. Decades more of enjoyment, time with the grandchildren, a whole chunk of life wiped out when a cure could be sitting there unused.

From today onwards, this is going to change thanks to the Early Access to Innovative Medicines scheme, which I have helped to design. It has the potential to revolutionise drug development and completes the vision set out in the UK Life Sciences Strategy launched by the Prime Minister in 2011 and the NHS Innovation Health and Wealth reforms. The core vision was that the UK would be a crucible of medical innovations that could help all of us live better for longer.

Medicine is currently undergoing a seismic shift, from a 20th century model (something done to us by Government) to a 21st century model (something we increasingly take a responsibility for ourselves). Revolutions in genomics and data are driving a new generation of targeted and personalised medicines, and reshaping the landscape of drug design. The old traditional ‘blockbuster’ Big Pharma model of the post-war years is ceding to the world of ‘translational’ or ‘experimental’ medicine in which drugs are designed with, and around, patients, their data and tissues, in clinical research facilities and hospitals.

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