A CANCER survivor has been chosen to represent bowel patients nationwide in discussions about life-extending cancer drugs.

Mother-of-two Barbara Moss, of Worcester, has been chosen to share her “expert patient” views at a drugs appraisal meeting of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice).

The meeting tomorrow at Nice headquarters in London will discuss three drugs used to treat bowel cancer – centuximab, bevacizumab (often referred to as Avastin) and panitumumab – for second-line treatment after traditional chemotherapy.

The meeting will examine issues such as the cost and effectiveness of these drugs in prolonging a patient’s life.

As previously reported in your Worcester News, Mrs Moss, of Aconbury Close, was given months to live after bowel cancer was diagnosed and was found to have spread to her liver in November 2006.

Mrs Moss had to pay for the cancer drug Avastin, which she says saved her life, using £21,000 and financial support from her then 86-year-old mother.

She said: “I am still alive as Avastin shrank the tumour sufficiently so that resection of the liver was possible.”

Mrs Moss has already listed the things she would not have seen had she not paid for her own treatment, refused on the NHS, including seeing her youngest son graduate as a teacher, holidays in France and celebrating her mother’s 90th birthday.

She said: “I beg that we listen more to our clinicians. I had the best doctors and surgeons but the NHS is restricting what they are allowed to do. Nice always says that one cannot prove it is Avastin that is effective and not the chemotherapy.

“I can categorically say it was the addition of Avastin to my second-line treatment which shrank my tumour and allowed resection. Without that, I would not be alive today.”

One of the issues Mrs Moss said she will be raising will be the Cancer Drugs Fund which she has welcomed alongside the city’s MP, Robin Walker. So far more than £1.7 million has been invested in the care of Worcestershire patients using the fund.