My noble Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Patient Safety, Women's Health and Mental Health (Baroness Merron) has made the following written statement:
I am pleased to inform the House that the first patients in England have now received life-saving plasma derived medicines made from UK donor plasma for the first time in over 25 years. This will boost self-sufficiency and reduce reliance on imports from abroad.
Blood plasma medicines are critical for approximately 17,000 NHS patients who rely on them to treat immune deficiencies and rare disorders. They are also essential in emergency medicine, particularly during childbirth and trauma care.
Using UK donor plasma was banned in 1998. This followed concerns about a potentially increased risk of plasma recipients acquiring the brain disease variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease due to UK plasma donors being exposed to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (sometimes referred to colloquially as mad cow disease) prions from infected cattle. The NHS has relied solely on imported plasma medicines since then.
The ban was lifted in 2021 following a review by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the Commission on Human Medicines. The plasma for medicines programme was set up in 2021 by the Department of Health and Social Care as a tripartite programme between the DHSC, NHS Blood and Transplant and NHS England. Since April 2021, NHSBT has re-established its plasma collection programme and collected 500,000 litres of plasma medicine. Following a successful procurement exercise by NHSE, Octapharma was appointed to fractionate the plasma into component parts (including albumin) and made into medicines. Shipments of UK donor plasma began in summer 2024.
This collaboration, along with the generosity of blood donors, means that the first patients in England are now benefiting from these medications. The devolved Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are already actively engaged in the programme, with similar benefits expected in the near future.
This development is a milestone to deliver the Government’s growth mission, and reflects excellent strategic collaboration between NHSBT and NHSE. This is a further step to establishing strategic self-sufficiency in critical medicines and reducing exposure to international markets, with the global plasma medicines industry expected to rise by $15 billion (2023) to $45 billion by 2027. In England, we expect 25% self-sufficiency on immunoglobulin by the end of 2025, growing to 30-35% by 2031, and 80% self-sufficiency in albumin.
DHSC will continue to work with NHSBT, NHSE and the devolved Governments to consider the next steps for self-sufficiency in the supply of plasma medicines.
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