Zytiga Extends Life by 6 Years

I started on the Phase II post-chemotherapy trial for Zytiga (Abiraterone Acetate) in 2006 at The Royal Marsden Hospital in the UK and I am still receiving benefit from the drug (as my only medication for prostate cancer) six years later. I have had very few side effects, none of them significant and little or no pain from the prostate cancer that had metastasised to my bones.
NICE is quoting four or five months as the time of average life extension. Be assured that I’m not the only man who counts the effectiveness received from the Abiraterone trial in terms of years rather than months – with a normal ‘quality of life’.
Others have raised the unassailable argument of how the UK government seems to have its priorities wrong when it comes to medical research and new drugs. I couldn’t agree more. Only 4 months ago NICE declined approval of Cabazitaxel. – Another drug researched and developed in the UK and shown to have proven benefit to certain types of prostate cancer.
Abiraterone (Zytiga) is now ‘standard treatment’ in many other countries so why should those in the UK, the country where these drugs have been discovered, researched and developed, be left out?
Such refusals by NICE must seem like hammer blows to the dispirited researchers and clinicians who have spent years of their lives working on the development of these new drugs. Who could blame them if they leave the UK to seek research posts in other countries where their work will be appreciated and put to the beneficial use of patients without quibble over cost.
Also, let’s not forget all those who have spent considerable efforts fund-raising so that these new drugs can be researched and developed in the first place.
In the UK we must maintain the pressure on NICE, MPs and Government ministers to ensure that this short-sighted decision is reversed so that the lives of many men, and the well-being of their families and loved ones, are saved.