To ask the Minister of Health whether the cancer drug Panitumumab is available for prescription in Health and Social Care Trusts; and to outline the rationale for this decision.

Panitumumab is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as an option for previously untreated RAS wild-type metastatic colorectal cancer in adults (TA439). Therefore it is available for suitable patients in Northern Ireland.

Medicines are commissioned for use in Northern Ireland where there is substantive evidence of clinical and cost effectiveness, as determined by NICE.

There are two other licensed indications for the use of panitumumab, neither are recommended by NICE and therefore not routinely commissioned for patients in Northern Ireland.

In circumstances where NICE has not recommended a particular drug, it can be requested by an individual patient’s clinician via the Individual Funding Request process which provides a mechanism to consider requests from clinical consultants for treatments for individual patients that fall outside the range of services routinely commissioned.