Medical Cannabis under Prescription

Debate between James Cartlidge and Seema Kennedy

Monday 20th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Seema Kennedy]

I apologise to the hon. Lady, because she did ask me that, and I am afraid I forgot to send a note to the Box. I am happy to write to her about whether that analysis has been done.

Many hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk, talked about funding. Funding decisions are local decisions with clear local procedures. The process review is looking at this, and as I have said, it will report shortly. I call on the industry to invest in more trials, and to publish the results and the full underpinning data, because we all want to see licensed products that doctors can use with confidence.

Where there is supporting evidence, the Government and the NHS will work with companies to make the products available. Indeed, more than 110 patients are now being treated with a pure CBD extract product—Epidiolex, which numerous hon. Members have referred to—on an early access programme, ahead of a licensing decision by the European Medicines Agency. In developing a licensed product, the evidence has been generated on the safety profile and effectiveness of the product. It is this that provides clinicians with the confidence to prescribe and the system with the evidence it needs to make decisions on routine funding. The NHS does not routinely fund any new medicine until it has been through a process of evaluation to ensure that it is safe, effective and represents value for money.

On another point that the hon. Member for Gower brought up, about one of her constituents going on the Epidiolex trial, the specialist centres around the country are referring patients to GW Pharmaceuticals. There are certain criteria and a certain number of places, but if she wrote to me, I would be happy to meet her and we could discuss that further.

We need to develop further our knowledge base on these products. That is why good-quality clinical trials are imperative. We need to know more about the scale of the benefit of cannabis-based products across a wide range of indications. We also need to understand how this compares with existing treatments and, indeed, other promising new drugs that may be as effective.

[James Cartlidge]

The Minister is obviously aware that Epidiolex is a CBD-based medicine. Many parents believe, based on their anecdotal experience, that those compounds do not have as much impact on reducing seizures as THC, so can she assure me that the trials will also look at THC-based products?