New cancer drugs could face NHS shortages and price hikes due to tariffs (2025)

Donald Trump’s tariffs could push up prices and disrupt the supply of vital US medicines needed by NHS patients such as cancer drugs, the Government has been warned.

The Health Secretary Wes Streeting said on Tuesday that the supply ofmedicinesin the UK could be adversely affected by tariffs imposed by the US.

Although pharmaceuticals were spared from direct inclusion on the White House’s tariffs, the industry remains anxious that Trump could decide to impose additional levies in future.

However, US pharmaceutical giants could still be forced to put up their prices to deal with rises in their own manufacturing costs from wider trade barriers, health experts warned.

“It is possible wider tariffs will increase the cost of chemicals, tools and other things in manufacturing that could lead to upward price pressure on medicines imported from the US,” said Mark Dayan, head of public affairs at the NuffieldTrust health think-tank.

Dayan said most of the UK’s bulk supply of generic medicines – which many companies can manufacture once a patent expires – comes from the EU and Asia.

But the US is still crucially important for certain drugs that cannot be bought elsewhere, especially the latest branded medications. “We get a significant amount of higher-end, patent medicines from the US,” he said.

“These might be where you would see anyprice issues and disruption. The extent to which itwill feed through is really difficult to tell. Itwould bedisproportionately likely to affect [NHS] secondary care, the medicines the NHS is buying.”

The UK imported £24.9bn of pharmaceuticals from around the world in 2023, Government statistics also show. Around £3.8bn-worth of pharmaceuticals were imported from the US, according to the ONS.

The US is a key producer of branded medications – which tend to be the latest drugs on the market and are patented by pharmaceutical firms to prevent them from being copied for a period of time.

NHS patientshave benefited from a wider range of cancer drugs, including those patented by US firms, following the voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing and access (VPAS)introduced by the Government in 2019.

One example is Sotorasib, a drug proven during trials to prevent lung cancerfrom growing for seven months, which has been available on the NHS since 2022 following a confidential deal struck with US giant Amgen.

Pembrolizumab, a life-extending treatment for advanced cervical cancer was made available to NHS patients in 2023 after a deal with American drugs manufacturer Merck.

However, experts said it was difficult to predict which particular drugs could be hit by higher prices and shortages in future.

Professor Martin McKee, public health expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the US tariffs were “likely to make [medicine supply issues] worse”.

With Trump expressing his desire to ramp up domestic drug production, US companies with factories overseas could decide to bring back some operations to the US.

McKee said American firms could put up medicine prices “because of the uncertainty – re-orientating supply chains, relocating factories and so on. It will cause a huge amount of disruption.”

He added: “The NHS has a limited budget, so anything that adds to cost will make things worse. We just don’t know what the disruption will be. It’s much too complicated to disentangle which products will be affected.”

Drug shortages were reported to the UK Government 1,938 times in 2024 – the highest number in four years, according to a recent report by the Nuffield Trust.

But Dayan said it was too early to say which specific US drugs could be disrupted by Trump’s tariffs.

He also said the US moves would not necessarily exacerbate shortages of epilepsy and cystic fibrosis medications seen in the UK in recent years.

“There’s no reason to think the medicines exposed to disruption from previous factors will be the ones most exposed again,” said Dayan. “A shock based in the US won’t necessarily be the sameas the impact of Covid-19, or the war in Ukraine, or Brexit.”

The worst-case scenario would see Trump administration imposing tariffs directly on the pharmaceutical industry, leading to a tit-for-tat tariff war which could push up global drug prices and cause far wider disruption to supply.

“If US tariffs were imposed on pharmaceuticalsas President Trump has threatened, andcountries around the world started to retaliate in kind, it would be driving up costs all over the world,” says Dayan.

On Tuesday Streeting said the Trump administration’s tariffs are “unprecedented in terms of global trade” and provide “another layer of challenge” for ensuring the UK’s medicine supplies.

Asked about supply disruption, the Health Secretary told Sky News: “There have been challenges in terms of manufacturing, challenges in terms of distribution, and if we start to see tariffs kicking in, that’s another layer of challenge, but we watch this situation extremely closely.”

Mark Samuels, chief executive of the British Generic Manufacturers Association (BGMA), also said the UK could see medicine supply disruption. “These big shocks are always a risk to supplies.”

Samuels called on Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers to do more for UK drug manufacturers so the country was less dependent on imports.

“I would argue that [reliance on imports] is unhelpful for national resilience during intense geopolitical times. Developing more generic medicine manufacturing in the UK needs to be treated as a high priority for Government support.”

The Government declined to comment.