Access to Medical Treatments (Innovation) Bill

Debate between George Freeman and James Morris

Friday 29th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman]

I shall deal with amendments 8 and 9, tabled by the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), and amendment 15, which I tabled on behalf of the Government. I shall also deal with some of the important points that Members have raised.

I have to say that I am not here every Friday, but I think that today’s debate is setting a high standard, both in terms of the issues that are being raised and the way in which it is being conducted. I hope that those who take a close interest in the Bill and are watching the debate are observing the cross-party nature of our discussion of some very important issues.

I thank the hon. Member for Lewisham East for her support for the spirit of cross-party working. The sector needs to be confident in the knowledge that the House is paying close attention to the issues that underlie the Bill—issues relating to data, informatics, genomics, drug trials and research—in a cross-party spirit. As the hon. Lady knows, in the course of my work I have paid tribute to the last Labour Government’s pioneers, Lord Drayson and David Sainsbury, who did so much to create the Office for Life Sciences. I think the debate reflects that spirit, and I welcome the hon. Lady’s restatement of her support for it.

I also welcome amendments 8 and 9, which specify and flag the importance of a wide group of consultees. I entirely agree with the principle of the amendments. Indeed, I would go further and include a range of patients’ groups, charities and others. I give the hon. Lady—and the House—a commitment, which I am happy to put in writing, that I will seek to involve all the organisations on her list, and indeed others, in the consultation that will take place following the Bill’s enactment.

As an experienced parliamentary operator, the hon. Lady knows that including lists of organisations in a Bill is always a mistake, because in the end it creates more problems than it seeks to resolve. However, I will happily write to all the bodies that she has mentioned, and to all Members as well, with a list of those who I think should be involved in the consultation.

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

I know that the Bill is specifically about access to medical treatments, but, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on mental health, I know that there is a growing need for the ability to share information about both drug-based and non-drug-based interventions in mental health care. Has any consideration been given to the sharing of information about mental health care in particular, and how would that fit into the framework of the Bill?

[George Freeman]

My hon. Friend has made a typically interesting and important point. I pay tribute to his work on mental health.

In no area of pharmacology and pharmaceuticals is drug discovery, drug use and prescribing more complex than in mental health. One of the projects on which I worked before entering the House was at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, where Professor Simon Lovestone has pioneered the use of informatics and data to integrate research into mental health conditions and the compiling of patient records information, MRI scans and, latterly, genomic information, to assist understanding of both the causes of disease and the way in which different patients respond to different drugs. As my hon. Friend will know, mental health care involves a wide range of very complex and, in some cases, very powerful drugs, and information about how those drugs work and how different patients respond is therefore crucial. I certainly want to ensure that we do not exclude mental health from the Bill’s provisions.

I tabled amendment 15 in connection with clinical research, an issue that received much attention during the Bill’s earlier stages. When—before these amendments were tabled—the Bill made provision for medical negligence, the Government were determined to ensure that none of its provisions would in any way undermine the United Kingdom’s world-class and world-rated landscape for the regulation of clinical trials. So the previous Bill contained a provision stating that nothing in it applied to clinical research. Now that my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) has tabled amendments to remove the clauses dealing with medical negligence so as to create instead a Bill focused purely on the provision of data on innovative medicines to clinicians, I suggest that we remove that exclusion of clinical research and make sure that the database—now that it has nothing to do with negligence—actually covers drugs in research. That would make sure that we do not preclude the inclusion of drugs in clinical trials that clinicians may want to recommend to their patients or investigate their patients’ eligibility for.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between George Freeman and James Morris

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

8. What assessment he has made of the potential of the genomics programme to improve cancer treatment.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (George Freeman)]

The Government’s £300 million genomics England programme, led and announced by the Prime Minister as part of our life science strategy, has the potential to improve dramatically cancer diagnosis and treatment. By sequencing the entire genetic code of 100,000 NHS patients and volunteers and combining the data with their clinical records, and launching a genomic medicine service—a world first for the NHS—we will be able to understand the genetic triggers of disease, unlock new diagnostics and identify better treatments from existing drugs.

[James Morris]

The number of people being treated for cancer successfully and getting appropriate diagnostic treatment in Dudley and Sandwell has increased substantially in the past five years, but does the Minister agree that harnessing genomic medicine is key to the future, and that we need to drive innovation in this field over the next 10, 20 and 30 years?

[George Freeman]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. He is absolutely right: cancer is a genetic disease, and the more we know about genetics, the more we discover about different patients’ predisposition to different diseases and drugs. That is absolutely key, and nowhere more clearly so than in breast cancer, where the HER2-Herceptin breakthrough and the BRCA2 gene are allowing us better to screen, predict and target treatment of breast cancer, freeing women from the choice of mastectomy, which has been far too dominant, and enabling us to treat breast cancer as a preventable disease.