Sustaining the health and adult social care workforce
What investments and actions are required to create a sustainable health and social care workforce?

A POSTnote which explains what advanced therapies are and how they can benefit patients, and gives an overview of the current regulatory framework and how this might change after Brexit.
Regulating Advanced Therapies (394 KB , PDF)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.58248/PN567
Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) are biological therapies which promise to transform many disease treatment, including a number of currently incurable ones.
The field has progressed rapidly over the last two decades with therapies now beginning to reach the market and patients. Examples of ATMPs include artificial tissues manufactured using stem cells, gene therapies targeting faulty genes responsible for incurable inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis. and immunotherapies in which immune cells are reprogrammed to recognise and attack cancers.
As complex therapies, ATMPs present a number of challenges to developers, regulators, and healthcare providers. They require a high level of expertise to develop and produce, which makes them expensive to market. Regulators have found it difficult to integrate their biological variability into pre-existing guidelines. Healthcare providers also face issues based on their complexity and expense. However, some national healthcare agencies have found creative solutions in funding them.
ATMPs are defined and regulated centrally at the EU-level by the European Medicines Agency, as well as addressed in a number of other regulations such as the EU Cell and Tissue Directives. Since the Regulations came into force, only 9 ATMPs have reached the market. Whilst the regulatory framework has been perceived as excessively stringent by some ATMP developers, these regulations have not been the principle reason that so few therapies have been developed. Instead it has been the difficulties in developing them and in enabling national healthcare agencies to fund patient use, due to a lack of evidence for cost-effectiveness.
There are further concerns over how the UK will regulate ATMPs after Brexit and how attractive to developers the UK will be after Brexit. This will likely affect patient access as well as funding for the field in the UK.
Key Points:
Regulating Advanced Therapies (394 KB , PDF)
What investments and actions are required to create a sustainable health and social care workforce?
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