Henriksen acknowledged Pharmac had a fixed budget but believed Enhertu should be funded for the type of cancer she had – advanced HER2-low breast cancer – given it was funded for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer.
The Breast Cancer Foundation New Zealand agreed and said more than 20 countries, including Australia, funded Enhertu for Henriksen’s type of breast cancer.
A foundation statement said people with HER2-low breast cancer made up 40% of advanced breast cancer patients in New Zealand.
Breast Cancer Foundation New Zealand chief executive Ah-Leen Rayner. Photo / Supplied
The foundation’s chief executive Ah-Leen Rayner said funding Enhertu would make a “monumental” difference, with clinical trials showing it offered an additional 4.8 months of “progression-free survival”.
“The impact on people’s finances having to pay for this themselves is significant.”
Rayner said Enhertu was a “standard of care” overseas.
“New Zealand needs access to the best quality treatments in line with other countries around the world, but instead New Zealand is languishing at the bottom of the OECD world for access to modern medicines.”
For breast cancer patients, “women are dying faster ... than women overseas”, she said.
Pharmac advice and assessment director and chief medical officer Dr David Hughes said it funded as many medicines as possible from its fixed budget.
“We acknowledge it is difficult when medicines aren’t funded and that cancer medicines are expensive.”
Hughes said it funded trastuzumab deruxtecan (branded as Enhertu) for people with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer for the first time as of January 1, 2025.
Pharmac received a funding application in April 2024 for Enhertu for HER2-low breast cancer when the cancer could not be removed by surgery or had spread around the body.
In May 2025, Pharmac sought advice from the cancer treatment advisory committee about the application, Hughes said.
Pharmac was compiling the meeting’s record to publish online, which would include a committee recommendation about funding Enhertu.