The British National Health Service (NHS) will be the first organization in the world to do so, offering hundreds of UK patients an injection to treat cancer and reducing treatment time by up to three-quarters. Patients could Shorten the duration of medication intake from 30 to 60 minutes, and they would only need 7 minutes.
Following approval from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the NHS reported on Tuesday Patients with suitable characteristics who are being treated with the immunotherapy atezolizumab will receive the injection This will speed up the work of oncology teams.
“With this approval, we can not only offer comfortable and faster care for our patients, but it will also allow our teams to treat more patients throughout the day,” said Dr. Alexander Martin, Consultant Oncologist at the West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust.
Furthermore, this injection is given subcutaneously, unlike the atezolizumab treatment, also known as Tecentriq, which is given to patients intravenously directly through a drip, which is often the case It can take around 30 minutes or up to an hour. in some patients when access to the vein is difficult.
“It takes about seven minutes compared to 30 to 60 minutes with the current intravenous infusion method,” says Marius Scholtz, Medical Director of Roche Products Limited.
Atezolizumab is an immunotherapy drug that is given by transfusion and helps the patient’s own immune system find and destroy cancer cells. With the new injection, the NHS expects the majority of the approximately 3,600 patients planned to be treated with atezolizumab to opt for the injection.
