International cancer experts have highlighted the need for access to new medicines at a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos while the UK is winding back the Cancer Drugs Fund.
The WEF's annual meeting brings together 2,500 of some of the world's most senior business, political and community leaders, to discuss significant issues facing the world.
In a session featuring US Vice President Joe Biden, who lost his 46-year-old son to brain cancer last year, speakers highlighted the potential of immunotherapies and their use in combinations.
Immunotherapies, such as MSD's KEYTRUDA (pembrolizumab) and Bristol-Myers Squibb's OPDIVO (nivolumab), fight cancers by harnessing the body's own immune system. They are both being trialled in dozens of cancers and in combination with a variety of therapies.
Several other global companies and emerging biotechnology companies have immunotherapies currently in development.
President Obama recently appointed Vice President Biden to lead a new initiative designed to cure cancer "once and for all". Obama said he wanted to "make America the country that cures cancer" in his recent State of the Union address.
Biden said the time had come for a ‘moonshot’ to find a cure for the disease, a reference to President Kennedy's stated ambition in 1961 calling on the US to successfully send a manned mission to the moon by the end of that decade.
Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, to the session that the potential of immunotherapies is "breathtaking".
The Vice President told the WEF session that he recently hosted a meeting with three pharmaceutical companies and the head of the FDA at which they pledged to do more to accelerate access to the new cancer therapies, particularly combinations.
"The head of the FDA made a commitment that everybody would move much more rapidly in approving combinations," he said, adding that the company executives made a similar commitment to finding innovative ways to accelerate access.
Cancer medicines are also making headlines in the UK following the announcement of changes to the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF).
The CDF was established in 2010 by the David Cameron led Conservative government in response to criticism over delays in access to new cancer medicines.
CDF spending has significantly exceeded its budget with funding withdrawn for some medicines.
Under changes announced by the NHS, the final say in CDF funding decisions will now by made by the country's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
Clinicians and patient groups have criticised the move, describing it as a "return to the bad old days."