Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of the ability of the NHS to adopt precision medicines with companion diagnostics at pace.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) makes evidence-based recommendations for the National Health Service on whether new medicines represent a clinically and cost-effective use of resources. To enable rapid access for NHS patients to effective new treatments, NICE aims wherever possible to issue recommendations on new medicines close to the point of licensing. The NHS in England is legally required to fund medicines recommended by NICE, normally within three months of the publication of final guidance.

Where a companion diagnostic test is required, the costs will be built in to the NICE appraisal process. To enable the rapid implementation of these, planning for delivery of testing, including identifying appropriate testing technologies and where new testing populations need to be supported, must begin before NICE draft recommendations are published to ensure that appropriate genetic testing is available at the capacity required.