THE FAMILY of an Oxfordshire cancer victim have stood up for the new medicines fund which he fought for years to keep.

Clive Stone’s son Andrew said yesterday he was ‘sure’ his dad would be defending the Cancer Drugs Fund.

The scheme, launched by David Cameron, was described yesterday as ‘not good value for money’ by a health researchers.

A team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found just 18 of the 29 treatments supported by the fund had actually increased life expectancy.

The typical overall survival benefit for the drugs was an extra 3.1 months of life, the scientists found.

When quality of life and toxic side-effects caused by the drugs were taken into account, the majority of drugs failed to show any evidence of meaningful clinical benefit, the researchers said.

The fund, which ran in England from 2010 to 2016 and cost more than £1 billion, aimed to increase access to cancer medicines not routinely available on the NHS.

Mr Stone, an ex-bank manager, played a key role in setting up the fund and battled 39 brain tumours himself after being diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2007.

His achievements up to his death in June 2016 included fighting successfully to make the life-extending kidney cancer drug Sunitinib available on the NHS in 2009.

The following year he persuaded then Prime Minister Cameron – his constituency MP – to allocate £200m to an emergency drug fund for cancer patients.

From 2010 to 2016 the Cancer Drugs Fund enabled some 80,000 patients to access treatments not otherwise available through the NHS.

But despite that, the team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said the fund ‘had not delivered meaningful value to patients or society’.

They went on: “There is no empirical evidence to support a ‘drug only’ ring fenced cancer fund relative to concomitant investments in other cancer domains such as surgery and radiotherapy, or other non-cancer medicines.”

Clive Stone’s son Andrew said yesterday: “I’m sure dad would have been defending the successes of the CDF.

“These ‘life extending’ drugs buy valuable time to be suitable for any new treatments/breakthroughs and dad probably wouldn’t have been considered for the innovative Gamma Knife therapy he had on his brain tumours if the Sunitinib wasn’t doing the job of slowing down the spread of his kidney cancer and keeping him relatively strong.”