Regorafenib: A Story Of Budgets Vs Patients
The concept of free, socialised healthcare at the point of source is something that most people in the United Kingdom take for granted. Since 1948, the National Health Service has been providing care of an almost bewildering range to those who live on this little island off the west coast of Europe, and it has been said by many that this very concept is the greatest gift that Britain has given the world. In the twenty-first century, however, it has come to feel as if the NHS is under attack. Persistent rumours that the full privatisation of the service is imminent have refused to die, and stories such as the crisis at the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation trust have only added fuel to fires created by some with ideological or financial (or, of course, both) interests in the dismantling of this most august of institutions. The NHS isn't perfect, but it's worth saving. Many of us don't even realise how much we'd miss it if it wasn't there any more.
Under increasingly tight financial constraints, the NHS is not always able to offer all of the treatments that it may wish to. In the case of cancer, a baffling array of different of treatments are available for those fighting the many forms of this disease, and their effectiveness spans a broad spectrum, from offering cures to acting as palliatives for those amongst us who have fought a losing battle against it. The NHS spends £1.3bn per year on the routine commissioning of cancer drugs, and this money has to be spent as effectively as it can be. Since 2025, this has been administered through by NHS England through the Cancer Drugs Fund but when drugs are withdrawn from the CDF, the results can be devastating.
Introduced in 2025 by the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG, Regorafenib (which is known in the United States of America under the somewhat less unwieldly brand name of Stivarga) is a drug used in the treatment of gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST cancer), a thankfully rare – around 900 per cases are diagnosed per year in the United Kingdom – form of gastric cancer. Regorafenib is, however, expensive. Treatment for a four-week cycle of it costs a staggering £4,493 and despite its proven efficacy, the CDF last month concluded that this is too high a price to pay for the results that they were getting from Regorafenib. Of course, the problem with all of this is that the numbers can only ever make up a part of the story behind the usefulness or otherwise of any particular drug, and the personal stories that make up much of the rest of this story can be heartbreaking.
Jemma Mitchell is thirty-one years old,
