Forward view – our priority topics for 2025 to 2026

Prioritising topics that matter most

Our mission is to get the best care to people fast, while ensuring value for the taxpayer. 

Prioritising the topics we produce guidance for is essential so that we know we're focusing on the areas that matter most to you in the health and social care system. 

During the 2025 to 2026 business year, we'll be focusing on: 

Biosimilars

We are helping to expand access to clinically and cost-effective medicines while creating NHS savings for reinvestment, through timely guidance updates or emerging generic and biosimilar medicines.

Supporting the 10 Year Plan 

The government's 10 Year Plan for healthcare and their Life Sciences Sector Plan mark a pivotal moment for healthcare and strengthen NICE’s role. 

These 2 plans set out 3 main priorities for NICE: 

1. Faster, fairer roll out of high impact HealthTech 

The 10 Year Plan will fund high impact medical and digital technologies across the NHS. This means that HealthTech which meets urgent NHS needs will be paid for and available nationwide, just like medicines.

We’re setting clear rules for how we assess important digital tools, medical devices, and tests, similar to how we assess medicines. We'll start by testing the new process with a small number of technologies, with a view to increasing the numbers in future years. 

Our recommendations will clearly show which innovations can quickly help people and offer good value. We'll work with partners to ensure our recommendations are adopted by the NHS. 

Find out more about our role in delivering the government's 10 Year Plan.

2. Updating guidance to drive smarter spending   

Our whole life-cycle approach will help the NHS stay up-to-date with best practice. We will keep our guidance current, reflecting changes in evidence, costs, and clinical practice. This approach helps us keep learning, improving care, and tracking how treatments change over time. 

This means we will not just assess a new medicine or treatment once and move on. We’ll keep reviewing the evidence as it grows, so that NHS care remains focused on what benefits patients most.  

This approach will help healthcare professionals make better decisions and improve care each year. It also ensures treatments are given in the right order, so people get the best option first and know what else is available if it does not work.

It will also enable us to expand access to cost-effective innovations, including biosimilars.      

3. Parallel decisions for faster access   

We’re supporting the government’s goal to simplify regulation and speed up access to new treatments. By April 2026, better coordination between NICE and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) will help bring medicines to people 3 to 6 months faster.

We’ll keep our process thorough, fair, and open. But instead of NICE reviewing treatments after the MHRA checks their safety, both decisions will be shared at the same time. This means faster recommendations, lower admin costs, and stronger support for the life sciences sector.

We're supporting the 3 priorities that the 10 Year Plan sets for the NHS

1. Analogue to digital 

The 10 Year Plan sets an ambition to make the most of modern technology, improving efficiency and patient care. 

Topics include: 

• AI imaging 

• digital cognitive behavioural therapies for insomnia 

• remote diagnostics 

• mental health and neurodevelopmental disorders. 

2. Hospital to community 

The new vision of the NHS is a model that provides continuous, accessible and integrated care. 

We're supporting this shift from hospital to community-based care through: 

• medicines enabling care outside hospital settings, for example, home monitoring for age related macular degeneration  

• rehab for joint surgery 

• medicines delivered through home care. 

3. Treatment to prevention 

The 10 Year Plan aims to transform the NHS from a service that treats conditions to one that prioritises prevention. 

We're supporting this through:  

• Lenacapavir for preventing HIV-1 in people aged 16 years or older [ID6495] 

• Semaglutide for preventing major cardiovascular events in people with cardiovascular disease and overweight or obesity [ID6441].

Jonathan Benger, chief medical officer, deputy CEO and interim director of the Centre for Guidelines talks through how NICE will be communicating new areas of priority each year.

What's next? Emerging areas and innovations in health and care  

Our enhanced horizon scanning function identifies emerging trends in health and care over the next 2 to 5 years. It focuses on 2 areas: medicines and HealthTech. The function reports on disruptive innovations – those that fundamentally change how health and care is delivered by making it more accessible, affordable, or effective, often replacing traditional methods entirely.

It will examine how these innovations work and their potential impact on health and care. This helps NICE and our partners prepare for and respond quickly to new disruptive medicines and technologies as they emerge.

Emerging disruptive medicines 

We worked with NHS England, the government, and health bodies across the UK to create a forward view of the disruptive medicine pipeline.

Areas include:

• New pharmacological treatments for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). These continue to feature prominently, reflecting the significant unmet need and limited current treatment options in this developing area. 

• In oncology, the emergence of new CAR-T therapies, advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs), and tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes. Particularly in areas where they are being applied to new cancer indications or addressing areas of clinical need. 

• Obesity, with rapidly emerging medicines and health technologies, and the number of people who could benefit from these technologies. 

Other areas under continued exploration include personalised medicines, such as cancer vaccines and radioligand therapies, which remain on our radar for their potential to transform care. 

Emerging disruptive HealthTech 

Emerging trends in HealthTech relate to obesity and technologies relevant to the nationally funded pathway for medtech, and the medicines pipeline. They also anticipate areas that may shape our strategic direction over the next 2 to 5 years.

These areas include: 

• AI-driven innovations beyond imaging

• quantum-enabled approaches for imaging and in-vitro diagnostics 

• the use of wearable devices in clinical pathways, for example in cardiovascular disease

• point of care testing devices for community or hospital-at-home settings.