Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to ensure that existing and cost-effective drugs which have been shown to be effective in reducing the risk of recurrence and spread of incurable cancer are repurposed as quickly as possible.

The Government is working with a range of organisations, including the Association of Medical Research Charities, to ensure that robust evidence showing new uses for existing drugs can be brought more systematically into clinical practice to benefit patients.

Significant progress has been made in designing a ‘drug re-purposing pathway’ to help the charities and others to navigate a route through the National Health Service so that they can see how research can be shared at a national level and then picked up locally where it can reach the patient. Work on this is continuing.