But does it work? Exploring the techno-scientific and socio-political dynamics of Health Technology Assessment and Pharmaceutical Regulation

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Appropriate use of medicines can make an important contribution to public health. Yet pharmaceutical drugs are expensive and costs are increasing at a time when national health care spending is constrained. Consequently, national governments and health care authorities must decide how best to allocate limited resources to achieve the greatest health benefits for society. This includes decisions on whether new drugs should be reimbursed. To inform this decision-making process, national governments are increasingly likely to establish organisations to undertake different forms of health technology assessment (HTA). The purpose of HTA bodies is to review and evaluate the available evidence, and to advise policy-makers on the clinical and cost-effectiveness of new medicines compared to available therapies. In the UK this function is undertaken by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Innovative pharmaceutical products can enter the market in the UK and other member states of the European Union only after they have been assessed by government scientists in national regulatory agencies or by the centralised European Medicines Agency (EMA). These organisations determine whether the drugs are safe and efficacious based on techno-scientific evidence, including data from clinical trials. The regulatory requirements of these agencies significantly determine the nature and quality of the evidence base for new drugs available at the time of a drug's launch onto the market. HTA bodies like NICE will then assess this evidence to determine whether new drugs offer sufficient therapeutic value relative to other treatments to justify reimbursement (that is, whether they are cost effective). Increasingly, stakeholders have claimed that the scientific evidence base for new drugs at time of market launch fails to provide robust data on clinical effectiveness and is consequently inadequate for HTA purposes. This in turn may lead to flawed decision-making, increasing the risk of patients being treated with sub-optimal drugs, scarce resources being misdirected, and missed opportunities for maximising health gains offered by other treatments. The proposed research aims to address this major emerging challenge for pharmaceutical and public health policy and to inform current policy debates on these issues by providing a social scientific investigation of how techno-scientific regulatory standards governing the development and marketing authorisation of new drugs assist and/or limit the ability of HTA organisations to evaluate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of such drugs and their contribution to public health. Through empirical investigations of NICE technology appraisals (TAs) of drugs to treat obesity and type II diabetes the research aims: 1) to determine the nature and extent of evidence gaps and uncertainty in TAs for these drugs; (2) to investigate the ways in which HTA technical assessors and other interested stakeholders respond to scientific uncertainties, and to explore the socio-political dynamics of those responses; and (3) to map and assess the prospects of recent initiatives within the UK and EU to align HTA, drug development and regulatory assessment with patient and public health needs. The research programme will be geographically located in the UK and the supranational EU, and will draw on documentary and interview research methods. In addition, training undertaken during the award in the methodologies of health economics, clinical epidemiology and health policy decision-making - and in particular training in specialist quantitative techniques - will enable the researcher to understand and engage effectively with the highly technical aspects of health technology appraisals.