Non small cell lung cancer Treatment Assessment Reports (TARs)

Thank you for your request dated 7 September 2023 under the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA) for information. You requested:

Can I please request the TARs for the following applications:

• Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) - Non small cell lung cancer, locally advanced or metastatic, PD-L1 positive, 2nd line
• Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) - Non small cell lung cancer, PDL1-positive, 1st line, monotherapy
• Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) - Non small cell lung cancer, metastatic, with chemotherapy, 1st line
• Alectinib - Non-small cell lung cancer, advanced, anaplastic lymphoma kinase-positive, first-line
• Osimertinib (Tagrisso) - Adjuvant treatment after tumour resection in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumours have epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations
• Osimertinib - Non-small cell lung cancer, locally advanced or metastatic, EGFR T790M positive, second line
• Osimertinib (Tagrisso)- First-line treatments of patients with locally advanced or metastatic EGFRm NSCLC 

Four TARs were identified in relation to your request. TAR 436 and TAR 436A (the update to the original TAR) cover the three pembrolizumab proposals. TAR 375 covers the alectinib proposal. The first osimertinib proposal (adjuvant treatment after tumour resection) has not yet been assessed, so there is no TAR at this point. The last two osimertinib proposals are covered in TAR 491.

We are pleased to provide you with these TARs attached to this letter.

Please note that there is an error in TAR 491. In rows 2-5 of Table 26 (first four scenarios), the incremental QALYs column should read 0.83 for all of these, as in the base case.

We have redacted a small amount of information from the documents as we consider this is necessary to:

• protect the privacy of natural persons (section 9(2)(a));
• protect information where the making available of the information would be likely to unreasonably prejudice the commercial position of the person who supplied or who is the subject of the information (section 9(2)(b)(ii));
• protect information which is subject to an obligation of confidence or which any person has been or could be compelled to provide under the authority of any enactment, where the making available of the information would be likely to prejudice the supply of similar information, or information from the same source, and it is in the public interest that such information should continue to be supplied (section 9(2)(ba)(i));
• enable Pharmac to carry on, without prejudice or disadvantage, negotiations, including commercial negotiations (section 9(2)(j));

We trust that this information answers your queries. Please note, you have the right to make a complaint to the Ombudsman about our response to your OIA, under section 28(3) of the OIA. Details of how to make a complaint(external link) are on the Ombudsman’s website.

To make information more freely available, we publish selected OIA responses (excluding personal details) on our website. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions about this.