OBJECTIVES: Oncology is one of the fastest moving areas of clinical practice, with 89 new oncology therapies receiving both EU and US marketing authorisation from 2010-2019. We aimed to use recently available open national data sources to describe the changes in utilisation of systemic anticancer therapies in England between 2019 and 2022.

METHODS: We used data between January 2019 and December 2022 from two national datasets in England: The Secondary Care Medicines Dataset containing processed pharmacy stock control data from all hospitals in England, and the English Prescribing Dataset containing information on prescriptions issued by general practitioners. Systemic anticancer therapy (SACT) treatments were classified based on their administration route, mechanism of action and inferred indication (breast, prostate, lung, colorectal and melanoma). Utilisation patterns and trends were described as population adjusted rates (total quantity per person/month).

RESULTS: During this time period we identified ~1.1 billion prescription items for SACT. Average monthly prescription rates were 24.5 for breast, 13.4 for lung, 9.0 for colorectal, 3.8 for prostate and 0.8 for melanoma per 100 people. There was a small (16%) drop in rates between 2019 and May 2020, corresponding to the early phase of the COVID19 pandemic but monthly rates subsequently rose to 46.4 per 100 people by December 2022 (30% higher than the 2019 average). Whilst cytotoxic agents remained the most used SACT in hospitals, between 2019 and December 2022 antibody-drug conjugates saw the highest percentage increase (219%) followed by hormonal agents (96%). All cancer types studied showed an increase in prescription rates after the pandemic.

CONCLUSIONS: Newly available open data sources make it possible to track trends in oncology medicines utilisation in England with a high degree of granularity and short data lag. Antibody drug conjugates are now the fastest growing type of SACT according to mechanism of action.