Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to ensure people with Huntington's disease have appropriate access to emerging treatment methods.

Patients with Huntington's disease have access to a range of services including the services of their general practitioner, associated health professionals neurology services, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, local mental health services for sufferers and their families, palliative care where appropriate and online resources, including factsheets.

A new drug for treatment of Huntington’s disease was recently trialed in humans for the first time, in groundbreaking research supported by the Department’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). Early results suggest that the new drug, known as IONIS-HTTRx, can successfully silence the faulty gene, lowering levels of the harmful huntingtin protein in the nervous system and slowing progression of the illness. The study was supported by the NIHR University College London Hospitals (UCLH) Biomedical Research Centre, the NIHR UCLH Clinical Research Facility and the NIHR Clinical Research Network. The research team now intends to move quickly to a larger trial to further confirm their findings.

The Accelerated Access Review (AAR) was launched to make recommendations to the Government on speeding up access for National Health Service patients to innovative and cost-effective new medicines, diagnostics, medical technologies and digital products. On 3 November 2017, the Government published its response to the AAR. The response sets out how the Government will work with industry and healthcare organisations to implement the recommendations made by the review. The response is available online at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/accelerated-access-review-response