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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
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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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