Insulin inhaler held back
Insulin inhaler held back
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Wednesday, 19, Apr 2006 12:16
Diabetics hoping to be able to replace insulin injections with an inhaler have been met with an unexpected setback today.
The UK's drug watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), has decided not to recommend Pfizer's new inhalable insulin product Exubera for use within the NHS due to concerns about its cost-effectiveness.
The decision has upset campaigners who had welcomed the development of the medication, the first ever non-injectable means of insulin administration, which is forecast to cost around £1,102 per patient each year.
Doctors and campaign groups will now get a chance to have their say on Nice's provisional recommendations, but must do so by May 10th this year before final guidance is produced in October 2006.
"Our review of the evidence indicated that inhaled insulin should not be recommended for the diabetic (type one or type two) population as a whole because it could not be proven to be more clinically or cost-effective than existing treatments," Andrea Sutcliffe, deputy chief executive at Nice, said.
"The clinical experts we asked advised us that using injected insulin is not usually a concern for the majority of people with diabetes. They also pointed out that the availability of inhaled insulin would not completely replace the need for injections of insulin for most people with diabetes, and that inhaled insulin might not fully alleviate any problems relating to true needle-phobia, because individuals would still need to use needles for glucose testing."
Pfizer, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, said that the guidelines issued by Nice were "perverse and shortsighted", while Diabetes UK has called on Nice to think again.
"We would like to urge Nice to reconsider its recommendations to take more account of the patients' perspective and meet individual needs and preferences," said Simon O'Neill, the charity's director of care.
"This is a medical breakthrough and it is the potential first step to improving the lives of some people with diabetes. It will be unfortunate if people in England have limited access whilst it becomes available in other countries."
Insulin as a treatment for diabetes was discovered in the 1920s, with around 800,000 sufferers in Britain currently managing their condition with the medication.