NICE issues negative draft guidance on Merck's Keytruda

4 October 2016

Medicines cost-effectiveness watchdog the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) today issued draft guidance not recommending US pharma giant Merck & Co’s (NYSE: MRK) Keytruda (pembrolizumab) to treat advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

There is currently no robust data on the long-term benefits of pembrolizumab. In its submission to the NICE, the company assumed that patients stopped using pembrolizumab at two years if their disease had not gotten any worse.

The NICE’s appraisal committee felt that in real-life clinical practice it was very unlikely that patients who were benefiting from treatment with the drug would stop taking it and therefore pembrolizumab could not be considered cost-effective.

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