The NHS will be able to offer children a new cancer therapy labelled the “most exciting treatment advance for decades”.
CAR-T is for aggressive leukaemia and can be used when other drugs have failed. It typically costs hundreds of thousands of pounds per patient.
Hospitals could start giving it to a small number of children within weeks. The first three NHS hospitals to apply to use the CAR-T (which stands for “chimeric antigen receptor T-cell”) therapy are in London, Manchester and Newcastle.
The funding will come from the Cancer Drugs Fund, which aims to fast-track access to the most promising new cancer treatments.