Petition Fund more CAR T Cell Therapy for eligible patients

Improving access to all types of cancer treatment is a key priority for this Government. We published the England Rare Diseases Action Plan 2025 in February 2025, with actions to enable improved and more efficient care for people with rare conditions, support rare disease clinical research trials, and to prepare the NHS to deliver groundbreaking, personalised therapies.

The UK is a global leader in the development of advanced therapies, with a strong academic and life science industry, and was the first national health system in Europe to commission chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T cell) therapy for blood cancer patients.

In April 2023, the NHS announced the roll out of personalised CAR-T therapies, offering three different CAR-T therapies for six different indications, benefitting adults and children with a range of cancers, with one of the CAR-T drugs available after just one therapy, providing quicker access for patients.

NHS England has been working with stakeholders and the life sciences companies to get centres up and running to deliver CAR-T cell therapy. Three centres have been set up for paediatric patients in London, Manchester and Newcastle, and there are 20 centres set up across England that will be able to provide CAR-T for young people up to the age of 25 years old, and adults.

CAR-T therapy is specifically developed for each individual patient and involves reprogramming the patient’s own immune system cells. These cells are then re-introduced to the patient to target their cancer. It is important to understand CAR-T cell therapy is a highly complex and potentially risky treatment, but it has been shown in trials to cure some patients, even those with quite advanced cancers and where other available treatments have failed.

We are pleased to learn that you were eligible for CAR-T cell therapy and are now in remission after successful treatment. However, I recognise the difficult journey you went through with failed treatments before receiving your treatment. The decision on which patients are eligible is decided by a national panel of expert clinicians following a referral from a specialist doctor, and in your case this process was followed that verified your eligibility as per recommendation.

To understand better why some therapies fail, a new research programme was launched last year, involving scientists from London and funded by £9 million from the Medical Research Council and the Office for Life Sciences, and £12.9 million from industry partners. The programme will involve thousands of patients treated with immunotherapy, which CAR-T is a form of, from across the UK and is aiming to discover why at least half of all patients fail to respond to immunotherapy, suffer side effects and to evaluate the barriers to the success of immunotherapy.

In the UK, medicines need to have a licence before they can be marketed, granted by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. To get a licence, the manufacturer of the medicine has to provide evidence which shows that the medicine is safe and effective enough to be used for a specific condition and for a specific group of patients, and that they can manufacture the medicine to the required quality.

Once licensed, new medicines can then be appraised by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). NICE is the body responsible for developing independent, evidence-based guidance for the NHS on whether medicines should be routinely funded based on an assessment of their costs and benefits. NICE only makes recommendations on medicines within their remit and NHS England is required to fund NICE-recommended medicines.

The Cancer Drugs Fund provides early access for NHS patients to effective cancer drugs recommended by NICE. Further evidence is then collected on the drug through the Cancer Drugs Fund for a defined period of time. This helps NICE decide whether the drug can be recommended for routine NHS funding.

NICE has evaluated and recommended several CAR-T therapies for use within the Cancer Drugs Fund for the treatment of various cancers, including for large B-cell lymphoma, B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and mantle cell lymphoma, which are now available to NHS patients in line with NICE’s recommendations.

The Government is committed to improving diagnosis and treatment for all cancer patients. That’s why we will develop our new National Cancer Plan, which will include further details on how we will improve treatment and outcomes for cancer patients. We encourage you to engage with our call for evidence, where we’re seeking views from individuals, professionals and organisations to inform the development of the plan. This call for evidence closes at 11:59pm on 29 April 2025.

Department of Health and Social Care