Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what treatment options are available for patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer who stop responding to Herceptin (trastuzumab).

The available treatment option for patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer who stop responding to trastuzumab (Herceptin) is trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla).

Trastuzumab emtansine is currently only available through the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) in England. However, on 29 December 2016 the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published draft guidance that did not recommend its use in the National Health Service in England. If the final NICE guidance remains negative, from 90 days after the publication of the final guidance, patients already receiving the drug via the CDF will continue to receive it until the patient and their prescribing physician consider it appropriate to discontinue treatment. However, no new patients will be able to receive it from that point and the treatment options for those patients will still be standard cytotoxic chemotherapy.