Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to assess the potential (a) costs and (b) impact on patients of the use of (i) lecanemab , (ii) donanemab and (ii) other Alzheimer's drugs.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is the independent body that makes recommendations for the National Health Service on whether licensed medicines should be routinely funded by the NHS, based on an assessment of their costs and benefits. NHS England is legally required to fund medicines recommended by the NICE, normally within three months of the publication of final guidance. The NICE is currently appraising lecanemab and donanemab and expects to publish guidance on both medicines later this year.

NHS England has established a dedicated programme team to prepare for any new Alzheimer’s treatments that are granted a licence by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and determined by the NICE to be clinically and cost effective for use in the NHS. The programme team is preparing for key challenges in implementation. This includes planning for additional diagnostic, treatment, and safety monitoring capacity, and the introduction of a new genetic test as well as amyloid positron emission tomography and computed tomography scanning, to ensure the new pathway for these medicines can be rolled out successfully.