Health: Medical Innovation

Lord Patel Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, for initiating this debate and for presenting it so movingly. This ought to be the start of such debates. It ought not to be the last debate we have on this subject. I hope he will remain committed to leading us in future debates.

Some of the treatments the noble Lord described, particularly for some cancers, are medieval and this continues to be the situation for some cancers. Treatment for pancreatic cancer, to which the noble Baroness referred and of which both my mother and my mother-in-law died, remains the same. However, there is hope. Some novel and innovative treatments are now being tried out, such as molecular tagging of drugs to get at cancers that are not amenable to conventional treatment. There is also nanomedicine for targeting tumours that are not responsive to current treatments. There are other technologies that I will come to which could be used to target tumours that are not receptive to radiotherapy.

We should also be slightly more optimistic in this country about where our science is today compared with 10 years ago. For instance, we have had 12 Nobel Prize winners in medicine and physiology since 2001. We have to go back to 1998 for the previous one. Not only that, we have Nobel Prize winners in allied disciplines, such as Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan who won the chemistry prize in 2009 for his isolation of the structure of life science-related diseases.

We now have a commitment from the Government to investing in science and having strategies in life sciences and other fields. We should give credit for that. We hope that innovations will come but we must also ensure that regulation is proportionate and is not bureaucratic. We must always keep an eye on that.

There is also the question of investment in translational medicine. One example is in the field not of drug therapy but in cell therapy where big pharma will not invest and small countries do not have the money to do early translational research. There are many examples. One is the use of embryonic stem cells as a therapy for age-related macular degeneration. Currently, the first-phase translation of that is being funded through research councils and charities. The Government should be funding early-phase translation. What plans do the Government have to help with this?

I come now to technological advances and I use the example of focused radiotherapy which is often referred to as “cyberknife”. Of course it is not a knife: it is focused radiotherapy. You cannot use conventional radiotherapy for targeting tumours because you will do more harm to normal cells. Currently, to make that available to a patient who is not amenable to conventional treatment, the doctor will have to ask for finances from commissioners or PCTs. They do not have the expertise to know whether that is indicated for that patient or not, and they may or may not fund it. The Government should be commended for accepting in the Health and Social Care Act that all NHS organisations must have an awareness of research, but it is difficult to find money to fund an expensive, one-off treatment. However, that is sometimes the only thing that is available to the patient. We should support such technologies and make sure that whenever we find that they are not supported, we do something about supporting them. Will the Minister confirm that he will expect commissioners to look at such treatments and innovations in a more favourable way and provide the funding that individual patients require? These treatments are expensive.

I again thank the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, for initiating this debate. We should debate some of these issues at length at the Second Reading of his Bill and I wish him luck with that.