Sipuleucel-T cost too high for prostate cancer patients
Final draft guidance not recommending sipuleucel-T for use with:
- Prostate cancer in men whose disease has spread,
- Who have few symptoms and with disease not yet suitable for chemotherapy treatment.
- Evidence showed price to NHS too high for potential benefit it may provide to patients.
Sipuleucel-T, known as Provenge and marketed by Dendreon, is a cell-based therapy that stimulates the patient’s own immune cells to identify and attack prostate cancer cells.
The treatment involves collecting white blood cells from the patient (called leukapheresis). Outside the patient’s body, these cells are combined with a protein to make sipuleucel-T, and then cells are infused back into the patient.
Sipuleucel-T is the first drug for metastatic hormone-resistant prostate cancer that is not cytotoxic or based on hormone-related therapy.
It prolongs overall survival compared with a placebo treatment, but it’s uncertain how well it works compared with other existing treatments.
It was not proven to delay the disease progress, unlike current treatments. Dendreon was seeking about £50,000 per NHS patient for this treatment.