By Michelle Clifford, Senior News Correspondent
A new law allowing dying patients to be treated with 'untested' medicines has received Government backing and could be in force as early as next year.
The Medical Innovation Bill - proposed by Conservative Peer Lord Saatchi whose wife died from cancer - would give legal protection to doctors who try out different procedures once they have exhausted established options.
Brian Woods, who lost his sister to cancer and whose wife has been battling the disease for over a decade, told Sky News the move makes sense.
"Everytime a new drug or a new combination of drugs is tested then whether they work or not science moves on," he said.
"So obviously for the patient involved the hope is they do work and their life can be extended or their cancer cured. But the fact is even it that doesn't happen doctors have learned something".
That is a view shared by Lord Saatchi, who has called every cancer death "wasted" because scientific knowledge was not advanced as patients have only received the standard treatments.
What he called "the endless repetition of a failed experiment".
But many patient advocates insist his bill would amount to a "quack's charter", unleashing potentially dangerous experiments on terminally ill people.
Peter Walsh, chief executive of Action Against Medical Accidents, said: "When people are vunerable they are going to have ideas put in front of them from doctors who may have good intentions but may want to experiment in perhaps a dangerous way on patients or even have a maverick appraoch to medicine."
Currently all medicines approved for use in Britain must undergo rigorous clinical trials before they can be licensed for use.
Even products which are still in development require a licence before they can be tested on humans.
Under the proposed bill doctors could prescribe patients with experimental treatments with no human trials. Recently an ebola treatment, Zmapp, which had only been tested on monkeys, was used in just this way.
If the bill is successful it could allow terminally ill people to volunteer to be treated with untried drugs.
Supporters say that will bypass the need for years of clinical trials, bring down the cost of the medicine and make pharmaceutical companies more likely to fund experimental drugs which may only be of use to a small number of patients with rare diseases.
Sir Michael Rawlins, former chair of The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), was initially sceptical but has been persuaded of the bills' merits now greater safeguards have been built in.
Doctors will need to get second opinions from specialists in the field before proceeding with experimental treatments.
He told Sky News: "Doctors are quite clearly inhibited in this area at the present and we know from recent and long past history that trying things out has sometimes produced wonderful, wonderful results."
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