Health: Degenerative Brain Diseases

Baroness Seccombe Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, we are clear that there needs to be a mechanism to assess the clinical and cost-effectiveness of new drugs, particularly those designed to treat rare and very rare conditions. NICE will indeed be the body charged with doing that. It is devising a process by which it can do so that is quite distinct from its normal technology assessment methodology. As the noble Lord will appreciate, the drugs concerned here are of a different kind and order of cost from those which NICE normally assesses. The noble Lord is quite right that that is the broad process which will be adopted.

[Baroness Seccombe]

My Lords, my husband did not have some rare disease but, following two strokes, he became involved with a research project called OPTIMA. He was then monitored. It gave my family—and me particularly—great satisfaction to know that he left his brain for research, which they found extremely useful.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.