My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for moving this amendment. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Lansley for laying the amendment and for creating the template for the innovative medicines fund—the Cancer Drugs Fund—in the first place. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, described the tens of thousands of patients who have benefited from that scheme. It has been a fantastic innovation and something I am sure we all want to build on.
It also seems entirely appropriate that I am following the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who gave a powerful speech. When I was a Minister, he was unrelenting in pointing out the weaknesses in the PPRS when it came to supporting innovation. He was right then and he is right now. That is why I needed no persuading to support this idea and this amendment. It was something that I tried and failed to introduce in the VPAS when I was a Minister, but perhaps a seed was planted then. It was fantastic to see the commitment made in the Conservative party manifesto in 2019 to create an innovative medicines fund.
As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, there are many areas, particularly, but not exclusively, rare diseases—and I have a daughter with a rare genetic condition—where experimental drugs seem to offer great hope, whether that is cannabinoids for epilepsy in children, or gene therapies for children with spinal muscular atrophy, or the many other conditions where the promise seems huge but the data does not yet convince. It feels to me that if we accept circumstances in which it is right to
give cancer patients access to those kinds of therapies, it should also be right to give all other patients access to those kinds of therapies too. That is really what the innovative medicines fund is about.
I think that we have seen the shape of the future innovative medicines fund and what it would look like. The VPAS allows for confidential, complex deals for the first time. We have seen CAR-T therapies come through that route. We have also seen a deal signed for Inclisiran—originally from the Medicines Company, now Novartis—with testing of that in a real-world situation following a very successful large-scale clinical trial that was largely focused in the UK. This provides a template for how we might go about doing business for common conditions, as well as for rare ones.
I am sure my noble friend the Minister will agree with everything she has heard today, so I want to ask her what the timetable is for introducing the scheme. Questions have been raised by the BIA and ABPI and others, and I very much agree with them that an ambitious definition of innovation is required. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, made an excellent point when he forcefully said that we must make sure that the rebate is recycled into innovative medicines, rather than just going back to the Treasury—there does not need to be an additional expenditure control mechanism. I will be grateful for my noble friend’s guidance on that.
One other thing that has come up in our debate in Committee so far—and of course this is more difficult because it takes it outside medicines and into other areas—is the exciting potential in devices, digital and diagnostics. There is no rebate scheme or automatic source of third-party funding that could provide for that. Is the Minister prepared to entertain exploring the potential for expanding the innovative medicines fund into something broader, and beyond medicines, perhaps not in its first iteration but in the future? I look forward to hearing what she has to say.