A young Londoner with advanced cancer today told how he turned to crowdfunding to raise £200,000 for a potentially life-saving drug not available on the NHS.
Momenul Haque, 33, from Camden, was diagnosed with colon cancer in December 2014 after a tumour “the size of an iPhone 5” was discovered.
He received chemotherapy before and after surgery at University College Hospital but was told a year later that the cancer was growing and the NHS had run out of treatment options.
However he and his friends began fundraising for a new immunotherapy drug costing about £6,500 every three weeks, to be provided privately. To date they have raised more than £100,000 and he has been able to start treatment.
His MP, Keir Starmer wrote to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt asking for help, saying it was “profoundly regrettable and unacceptable that anyone should have to fund potentially life-saving treatment in this way”.
Mr Haque, who was forced by illness to give up his job as a student development director at Kingston University, said: “Emotions have been wild. When they told me it was not available on the NHS and there was no compassionate usage and no clinical trials, I was depressed, pretty much gone.
“Then a friend said we need to fundraise. He said he couldn’t live with himself if we didn’t do anything.”
Pembrolizumab is described as one of the most promising new immunotherapy drugs being used to treat cancer and is believed to have helped former US president Jimmy Carter to beat brain cancer last year.
Unlike chemotherapy, it does not kill cancer cells directly but boosts the immune system to do the job. However, it is only approved in the NHS as a treatment for advanced melanoma skin cancer, not colon cancer. More than 70 per cent of skin cancer patients were still alive a year after starting to receive it.
Dr Tobias Arkenau, who is treating Mr Haque at HCA’s Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Harley Street, said: “Young adults are really the ones who benefit from immunotherapy. It will control his disease for many months and even years.”
An NHS England spokeswoman said it had no record of a request for Mr Haque to receive Pembrolizumab on an individual basis.
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