LONDON -- Britain’s drug regulators have given the OK for a British American Tobacco (BAT) electronic-cigarette vaping device to be sold as a “quit-smoking medicine,” the first such product to be given a drug licence in the UK, said a Reuters report.
The decision to license BAT’s e-Voke product means it can now be prescribed on the state-funded National Health Service (NHS) for patients trying to give up smoking.
“We want to ensure licensed nicotine containing products--including e-cigarettes--which make medicinal claims are available and meet appropriate standards of safety, quality and efficacy to help reduce the harms from smoking,” the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said in a statement cited by the news agency on Monday.
The statement said the e-Voke license was granted “recently,” and a spokesperson told Reuters it was issued “towards the end of last year.”
Many experts think e-cigarettes, which heat nicotine-laced liquid into an inhalable vapor, are a lower-risk alternative to smoking, said the report, but since they are relatively new products, there is little long-term evidence on their safety.
Public Health England, the government’s public health agency, has said it considers e-cigarettes to be at least 95% safer than tobacco cigarettes, which cause lung cancer and many other diseases and kill half of all those who use them.
BAT said in a statement on its website it is “currently evaluating plans to commercialize” e-Voke, which uses cartridges containing pharmaceutical grade nicotine.
More than two million adults use e-cigarettes in Britain, about a third of whom are ex-smokers and two-thirds current smokers, according to the report, citing Action on Smoking & Health.
Tobacco firms, including BAT, Philip Morris International, Japan Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco Group, are jostling for position in the emerging vaping market, which is estimated at around $7 billion for 2015.
The MHRA said it would “continue to encourage companies to voluntarily submit medicines license applications for e-cigarettes and other nicotine containing products as medicines” and hoped to see more e-cigarettes and next generation nicotine delivery products submit applications in future.
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