Thousands of patients with a severe form of arthritis will receive free treatment with a breakthrough drug after a surprise decision by the NHS treatments watchdog today.
The recommendation by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) to provide the drug MabThera on the NHS was hailed by arthritis charities.
The Nice guidance means doctors in England and Wales can now prescribe it to people with severe rheumatoid arthritis who have not responded to other therapies. Local health trusts now have three months to ensure all qualifying patients receive MabThera.
Nice's approval comes less than three weeks after the watchdog issued draft guidance rejecting free prescriptions of another new drug for rheumatoid arthritis called Orencia.
The charity Arthritis Care said the latest decision offered hope to thousands of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers.
Its chief executive, Neil Betteridge, said: "It's a triumph. Now there is no excuse for denying this drug on any but clinical grounds."
Rheumatoid arthritis is a painful and sometimes crippling autoimmune disease that affects an estimated 400,000 people in the UK. It occurs when the immune system attacks the joints, causing swelling and damaging cartilage and bone.
MabThera, the Roche brand name of the drug rituximab, is a synthetic antibody that targets one of the key immune system cells involved in rheumatoid arthritis.
The drug is already freely available to patients in Scotland after a similar decision by Nice's counterpart, the Scottish Medicines Consortium.
MabThera's relatively low cost is part of the reason for its approval by Nice. At £4,657 to treat one patient for a year the drug is almost half the price of other therapies.
The total cost of the disease in England alone, including health care and indirect costs such as lost working days, has been estimated at up to £1.2bn a year. Anti-TNF (tumour necrosis factor) drugs, the most advanced current treatment for severe rheumatoid arthritis, cost around £9,000 a year. MabThera will be available to NHS patients who fail to improve after first being given an anti-TNF drug.
A spokeswoman for the Arthritis Research Campaign, which sponsors research into the disease, said Nice's decision gave patients who failed to respond to anti-TNF therapy "a lifeline".
An article in the June edition of medical journal The Lancet highlighted the success of MabThera in slowing the progression of rheumatoid arthritis. The study found it reduced symptoms by more than 50% for more than a third of patients.
