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The success of NHS England’s Innovative Medicines Fund will depend on its operational details

Nature Medicine volume 29, pages 289–291 (2023)Cite this article

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In the UK, England’s National Health Service (NHS England) recently launched the Innovative Medicines Fund (IMF) to fast-track promising new drugs, operating on similar terms to — and with the same £340 million budget as — the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF)1. Both managed-access funds should be exceptional patient-access routes that are used in the case of immature evidence on a drug’s value from randomized interventional studies. They provide interim funding for drugs with clinical and cost-effectiveness uncertainty, while data collection aims to fill evidence gaps through ongoing clinical trials and publicly funded observational studies. The IMF’s guiding principles are listed in Table 1.

Table 1 The eight guiding principles for the Innovative Medicines Fund
Full size table

“Equal potential opportunity to benefit from promising but uncertain medicines” beyond cancer therapies is a laudable goal, but how it will be realized, and whether uncertainties can be resolved via such access schemes, remains to be seen. The growing drug pipeline for “rare conditions” is highlighted1, suggesting an emphasis on orphan medicines; therefore, certain types of non-cancer drugs might be more eligible than others.

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References

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Miners, R. Grieve and J. Cairns for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health Services Research and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

    Aris Angelis, Ajay Aggarwal & Andrew Briggs

  2. Department of Health Policy and LSE Health, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Aris Angelis

  3. Department of Oncology, Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust, London, UK

    Ajay Aggarwal

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  1. Aris Angelis
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Correspondence to Aris Angelis.

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Competing interests

A. Angelis was a 2021–2022 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Scholar; has received research grants from Novartis and Krystal Biotech and consultancy fees from the Department of Health and Social Care and the European Commission; and shares ownership in a health tech company developing software tools for decision-making. A.B. has acted as consultant to various commercial companies that have products funded through the NHS.

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Angelis, A., Aggarwal, A. & Briggs, A. The success of NHS England’s Innovative Medicines Fund will depend on its operational details. Nat Med 29, 289–291 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-023-02206-w

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