CANCER campaigner Clive Stone last night said the fight was worth it after starting to take the drug he spent years battling for.

The 63-year-old started taking Sunitinib, a life-extending drug for kidney cancer patients, last month.

It came after a group of cancer specialists criticised the provision of such life extending drugs, saying they were a drain on finances which provided false hope and caused painful side effects.

In 2009 the former Oxford Mail columnist led a successful campaign to get the NHS to pay for the drug. Taking on the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) Mr Stone and a group of campaigners fought to get the drug, also known as Sutent, as a first-line treatment for renal cancer.

They eventually won the campaign in February 2010.

Arguing in an article in The Lancet Oncology journal, 37 cancer specialists criticised the use of life extending drugs.

Dismissing the claim, Mr Stone, from Eynsham, said: “Basically what they are saying is that we are not worth the money. There are side effects, as with any drug. But my quality of life has not changed.

“I feel really fit and up for the fight still.”

The annual cost for Sunitinib is about £32,000 per patient per year, according to Nice.

Dr Peter Skolar, chairman of the Oxfordshire Joint Health Overview & Scrutiny Committee, said it was hard to frame the debate in terms of whether the drug was value for money, but added the NHS was a cash limited service.

He said: “We should be spending tens of thousands of pounds across the population to get better treatment and early diagnosis.

“This is being done cock-eyed. We are spending the money on people who are terminal and that’s the wrong way.”

Dr Skolar said that more research was needed so expensive life prolonging drugs were only given to patients who could be shown to benefit.

Dr Ljuba Stirzaker, of Oxfordshire PCT, said the Government’s new Cancer Drug Fund dealt with requests for an agreed list of costly cancer drugs.

The PCT now only hears cases where patients want treatment not on the list. A panel of GPs, nurses, public health consultants, managers and clinicians have to be convinced that the patient will benefit from the drug more than the general population of patients.

But Jenny Wheeler, who lost her 57-year-old husband Jim to cancer in 2008, said being refused the drug Sunitinib denied him the chance to see his third granddaughter born.

She said: “Jim would have taken anything to extend his life so that he could stay longer with his family.”