Saturday 11 June 2022 11:40 PM Skin cancer patients on NHS will get 'life-changing' new drug cemiplimab trends now

NHS patients battling against a deadly form of a common skin cancer will now get a drug that can banish tumours for twice as long as current treatments.

Cemiplimab will be available to hundreds of patients with advanced squamous cell carcinoma who haven't responded to surgery and radiotherapy.

The disease, the second most common skin cancer, is normally not life-threatening and relatively easy to treat, but in rare cases it spreads to other parts of the body and becomes fatal.

Previously only a handful of people could access cemiplimab as part of a clinical trial. Now the UK drugs watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), has ruled it will be available to all NHS patients when their disease starts to spread.

The decision follows striking trial data that revealed half of patients on cemiplimab live for at least two years. Typically, experts say those at this stage of the illness do not survive longer than a year. Previous trials have shown the medicine shrank tumours by more than 30 per cent.

Dr Andrew Sykes, consultant clinical oncologist at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, said: 'Before this drug arrived, these patients were often left staring down the barrel of a life sentence and rarely survived more than a year. But now we're seeing patients in our clinic who have been on this drug for at least two years and are still disease-free. It really is life-changing.'

About 28,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma every year. The vast majority of cases are caused by damage to the skin from UV rays – either from the sun or tanning beds. The cancer appears

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