News

17 February, 2022

Micro-costing toolkit to address challenges of bringing cell and gene therapies to NHS patients

Health Technology Wales has helped address the challenge of bringing high-value cell and gene therapies to NHS patients by creating a micro-costing toolkit.

The organisation, which assesses non-medicine health technologies in Wales, collaborated with the Midlands-Wales Advanced Therapy Treatment Centre (MW-ATTC) and network of specialists to create the toolkit as part of the Advanced Therapies Treatment Centre Network Programme

To aim of the project was to provide a tool that could be used to conduct robust health economic analyses when bringing high-cost cell and gene therapies to patients in the NHS. Economic evidence needs to be generated early in the development of cell and gene therapies, to facilitate health economic analysis and enable market access. (Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult, 2019) A central challenge in assessing the cost effectiveness of an intervention is the accurate identification, measurement, and valuation of healthcare resource use.

The aim of the Advanced Therapies Treatment Centre Network Programme is to develop tools, frameworks and methodologies to aid the assessment of advanced therapies and therefore to facilitate future commissioning decisions.

HTW performed a systematic literature review of the resource collection methods employed in previous economic analyses of advanced therapies. It then used this evidence and expert input to develop a micro-costing toolkit. The micro-costing toolkit aims to facilitate the assessment of the full cost of delivering advanced therapies to the NHS. This could inform future assessments of whether different advanced therapies deliver sufficient value for money.

The micro-costing toolkit breaks down the delivery of advanced therapies into different phases, from patient suitability assessment through to routine monitoring, to facilitate the bringing together of costs incurred at different times and in different parts of the system. The micro-costing toolkit is intended to be adaptable; for example, the user is able to select the type of advanced therapy (in vivo Gene Therapy Medicinal Product (GTMP), ex vivo GTMP, Somatic Cell Therapy Medicinal Product or Tissue Engineered Product. It is also designed to be flexible to the different types of data which may be available. It can accommodate detailed ‘microcosting’ or higher-level top-down costing where available. The toolkit could inform data collection alongside randomised controlled trials or could be filled in retrospectively by health economists undertaking economic analyses.

HTW recorded a webinar which demonstrates how the micro-costing toolkit might be used in practice, which is available here: https://www.theattcnetwork.co.uk/webinars