Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to request that NICE begin an appraisal of the Optune Tumour Treating Fields device for the treatment of glioblastoma.

The Department has no plans to request that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) appraise tumour treating fields (TTF), or to intervene in NICE’s established guidance prioritisation process.

NICE considered the use of TTF in its guideline on brain tumours, reference NG99, published in 2018, and recommended that the treatment should not be offered for the management of newly diagnosed glioblastoma or recurrent high-grade glioma, based on an assessment of the evidence available at the time.

Decisions on whether guidelines should be updated in light of new evidence are taken by the NICE prioritisation board, chaired by NICE’s Chief Medical Officer, in line with its published prioritisation framework. NICE’s prioritisation board considered TTF for glioblastoma in July 2024 where they agreed that the topic should not be prioritised but reconsidered when relevant key trials have completed.

At the meeting on 15 September 2025, the topic was reconsidered. The prioritisation board noted that some trials are ongoing, including a key trial that is likely to be published in 2026, and consequently agreed that the topic should still not be prioritised at this time, but revisited once those trials have been published.