MSD given the go ahead for bladder cancer treatment

The National Institute for Care and Health Excellence (NICE) has granted funding for MSD’s Keytruda for the treatment of bladder cancer. The drug will be used for untreated locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma in adults when cisplatin-containing chemotherapy is unsuitable. However treatment should be stopped at two years of uninterrupted treatment, or earlier if the disease has progressed.
Within the UK, over 10,000 people a year are diagnosed with bladder cancer and 9,000 with urothelial cancer, and about 540 of these could benefit from being treated with Keytruda. Founder and chief executive of Fight Bladder Cancer, Andrew Winterbottom, is delighted with the move: “A cisplatin-containing chemotherapy is usually the first line of treatment for people with late stage bladder cancer, but many patients may not be suitable due to underlying clinical parameters. If people can’t tolerate it, there aren’t many options left. It is very exciting to see breakthroughs like this, where new treatments are likely to offer meaningful objective response for a number of patients receiving treatment and it is generally well tolerated – a major change in clinical practice.”