A quick update for you on my PhD publications. Last year, I completed my PhD which considered the issues surrounding the economic analysis of genomic diagnostic technologies in the UK NHS. So far, I have published three papers reporting the results of this work:

• Paper 1 (2013): “Issues surrounding the health economic evaluation of genomic technologies”
• Paper 2 (2015): “Welfarism versus extra-welfarism: can the choice of economic evaluation approach impact on the adoption decisions recommended by economic evaluation studies?”
• Paper 3 (2016): “Patients’ Preferences for Genomic Diagnostic Testing in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia: A Discrete Choice Experiment”

I am pleased to be able to report that the fourth paper arising from my PhD work was published today in PharmacoEconomics, titled: “Using genomic information to guide ibrutinib treatment decisions in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia: A cost-effectiveness analysis“.

A key aim of my PhD work was to conduct both welfarist and extra-welfarist economic evaluations of the use of next generation sequencing to guide treatment decisions for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). This paper reports the results of the extra-welfarist economic evaluation, which took the form of both a cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis.

The key result was that stratifying patients with CLL to targeted treatment using genomic testing is not a cost-effective use of limited UK National Health Service resources, primarily owing to the high cost of ibrutinib treatment. However, if a higher end-of-life cost-effectiveness threshold is applied, if a societal costing perspective is considered in younger patients or if the cost of ibrutinib treatment falls, strategies that use genomic information to stratify patients to ibrutinib treatment become cost effective.

There are four more publications planned as part of this PhD work, and I hope to be able to update you with news of these publications in a few months’ time.