Brain Cancer: Medical Treatments
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many patients in England are receiving treatment with the Optune Tumour Treating Fields device; and at which NHS Trusts such treatment is available.
Answered by Dr Zubir Ahmed
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) considered the use of tumour treating fields (TTF) in its guideline on brain tumours, reference code NG99, published in 2018 and recommended that the treatment should not be offered by the National Health Service for the management of newly diagnosed glioblastoma or recurrent high-grade glioma, based on an assessment of the evidence available at the time.
Decisions on whether guidelines should be updated in light of new evidence are taken by the NICE prioritisation board, chaired by NICE’s Chief Medical Officer, in line with its published prioritisation framework. NICE’s prioritisation board considered TTF for glioblastoma in July 2024, where they agreed the topic should not be prioritised but reconsidered when relevant key trials have completed.
At the meeting on 15 September 2025, the topic was reconsidered. The prioritisation board noted that some trials are ongoing, including a key trial that is likely to be published in 2026, and consequently agreed that the topic should still not be prioritised at this time, but revisited once those trials have been published.
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