Breast cancer patients could get ‘precious extra months’ with loved ones after a U-turn from health officials on a drug.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence decided to not recommend £2,950-per-packet treatment abemaciclib for routine use in England in February as it was too expensive.

But thousands of women will now get the twice-daily pills on the NHS after a discount was agreed with manufacturer Eli Lily.

Draft guidance has given the green light to use of the drug – given with fulvestrant – which targets breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body in patients who have not responded to previous treatment.

It remains unknown how much the NHS will pay as the new contract is confidential.

Nice said it had also heard, during consultation, of the value to patients of having abemaciclib as an alternative treatment option with different side-effects.

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in the UK, with 55,200 new cases every year – around 150 every day.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, chief executive at the charity Breast Cancer Now, which urged a reversal of the decision, described the news as ‘fantastic’.

She said the drug could help women ‘have the best quality of life possible in these extra months with side-effects that may be more tolerable for some women than those of other CDK 4/6 inhibitors available on the NHS’.

She added: ‘This treatment can also delay the need to start chemotherapy and enduring its debilitating side-effects.’

Drugs like abemaciclib are welcomed by patients with incurable advanced breast cancer ‘because they can delay the time before their cancer gets worse and so delay or avoid the need for chemotherapy’, Meindert Boysen, director of the centre for health and technology evaluation at Nice, said.

He continued: ‘The committee also heard from the patient experts that exemestane plus everolimus, the treatment that would normally be used at this stage, was poorly tolerated and used for only a small number of people because it has similar effects to chemotherapy on quality of life.

‘We are therefore very pleased to be able to recommend that abemaciclib with fulvestrant can now be provided routinely as another option for people with advanced breast cancer who have already had endocrine therapy.’

Final guidance on the drug will be released by Nice in September.

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