[Lev]

New test and trial treatments available to Danish patients

by Lev on Sat Oct 04, 2014 2:09 am

I hope that this is relevant here as well, since many international multiple myeloma patients are using The Myeloma Beacon.

The program mentioned here is of course only directly relevant for Danish multiple myeloma patients.

The official name is: NEXT = National EXperimental Therapeutic partnership.

If your cancer is not responding to existing treatment, then a new program is available to give access to trial medication within a trial program or just for the individual patient.

"The world's first collaboration between public hospitals, universities and the pharmaceutical industry will offer new drugs for cancer patients who are not responding to standard treatment. The project has a budget of 124 million dollars."

Since there are only 5 million Danes, 124 million USD is a relatively large amount. Even more so since it is directly devoted to access to set up new trials and to give access to not yet or generally approved medication.

Here is a link to information (in Danish).

Access to trial programs and new medication has of course always been available, also for Danish patients. But this project want to make trials at very early stages available to Danish patients. The intention is also help to shorten the time it takes before new medication can be approved.

In Denmark (and the other Nordic countries) hospital treatment is free for all. But if the medication is not yet approved for use after all the usual trial phases, it will need special approval. It seems that this program is intended to make this procedure easier and to make sure that, if something is available in other parts of the world, then Denmark and Danish patients will have access - and the intention is clearly to make the industry see Denmark as a first choice for new / early clinical trials.

Here is another document (also in Danish) explaining the focus on strengthening "early phase" research in Denmark and access for Danish cancer patients to phase 1 and phase 2 trials:

Information about the Innovation Foundation (in English).