In a statement, a NHS Berkshire spokesman said its policies were based on "clinical effectiveness evidence" as well as cost.
The first step to savings is checking out various Web sites that attempt to rate and compare drugs on clinical effectiveness, similarities to others and even price.
The independent Advisory Group for National Specialised Services (AGNSS) has recommended that Eculizumab should be prescribed on the NHS and while the Department of Health said it accepted its advice on the clinical effectiveness, it wanted "further, rounded advice" taking into account the cost, benefits and affordability of the drug.
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His said this drug still need to be assessed in much larger clinical trials before its effectiveness was known.
What schools need, he said, is something like NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), the public body that assesses medicines and medical techniques for safety, clinical efficacy and cost effectiveness.
When Schering-Plough and Merck announced Nov. 19 they had been advised to change the scientific goal of a long-delayed clinical trial comparing the effectiveness of their blockbuster cholesterol Vytorin to a generic, the decision drew press scrutiny, criticism and a Congressional investigation.
Genentech's Avastin is awaiting Food and Drug Administration approval after a successful phase-III clinical trial that demonstrated its effectiveness in combination with chemotherapy for treating colorectal cancer.
Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE), means for Zyprexa.
But Iressa failed to prove its effectiveness in a large clinical trial, and its use was severely curtailed.
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Biopharmaceutical companies have been building such comparative effectiveness studies in their clinical development programs for the past decade.
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The agency can leave ECT devices in their current class and require manufacturers to provide evidence of safety and effectiveness, which may entail new clinical trials and could temporarily limit the devices' use.
Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which assesses the cost-effectiveness of new medicines that might be paid for by the country's National Health Service, reckons, for example, that abiraterone is too expensive to justify the extra months of life it brings.
The safety and effectiveness of Kynamro were evaluated in a clinical trial of 51 patients with HoFH.
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Even in the absence of plausible theory (or just common sense), rigorous clinical testing could provide evidence of homeopathy's effectiveness, but the data suggest otherwise.
Clinical trials would be needed to test the safety and effectiveness of the treatment, he added.
Comparative effectiveness research involves running large, statistically robust clinical trials so we can judge how different therapies for a particular disease compare to each other.
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The FDA and Vivus both acknowledge that the three clinical trials meant to measure Qsymia's safety and effectiveness were not designed to properly assess cardiovascular risk.
The microneedle vaccines could be self-administered, but we need to await the outcome of human clinical trials and successful filing of all the clinical documentation (safety studies, and results of vaccine effectiveness) to the national regulatory authorities, who will decide who can administer this type of vaccine.
The safety and effectiveness of Xarelto for the new indications were evaluated in three clinical studies.
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Two clinical studies involving 1, 684 patients with lupus demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of Benlysta.
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Two years ago, a panel rejected Xinlay, a prostate cancer drug from Abbott Laboratories, because the only evidence for its effectiveness came from after-the-fact analyses of two clinical trials.
Two years ago, a panel rejected Xinlay, a prostate cancer drug from Abbott Laboratories (nyse: ABT - news - people ), because the only evidence for its effectiveness came from after-the-fact analyses of two clinical trials.
Comparative effectiveness research is part of a plan to reallocate health care resources in a way similar to the U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which uses "experts" to judge the cost-effectiveness of therapies, in order to decide which ones the government will pay for.
Almost all of these vaccines, however, are in Phase I clinical trials--early-stage tryouts meant to judge safety, not effectiveness.
Clinical trials are expected to begin later this year to test the drug's effectiveness in humans.
Many conservatives reacted by arguing that comparative effectiveness research is bad, because it is a pretext for government interference in clinical practice, and for price controls.
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In an unprecedented move that could signal dramatic changes in the drug industry, GlaxoSmithKline is promising to make detailed data from its clinical trials available to independent researchers so that scientists can draw their own conclusions about the safety and effectiveness of its new drugs.
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Although the findings of the studies are mostly consistent in showing a similar magnitude hazard ratio, estimates of the effectiveness of sipuleucel-T are imprecise due to the relatively small total sample size of the clinical trials, and unmeasurable biases due to potential confounding effects of frozen salvage product and post-progression treatments.
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