Is rentosertib available in the UK?

No. Rentosertib is an investigational medicine. It is not licensed in the UK, and it is not licensed anywhere else in the world. There is no legal way to obtain it in the UK, privately or on the NHS.

Anything offered for sale online under the name rentosertib, or under its research codes ISM001-055 or INS018_055, is unregulated and of unverified content, dose and purity.

What has and has not happened

No licence application. The company has not applied to the MHRA for a UK marketing authorisation, and no application has been made to the European Medicines Agency either.

No place in the Early Access to Medicines Scheme. This MHRA scheme can make an unlicensed medicine available before approval for a life-threatening condition. Rentosertib has not been given a Promising Innovative Medicine designation, which is the first step.

The Innovative Licensing and Access Pathway is now closed to it. This is the joint MHRA, NICE, NHS England, SMC and AWTTC route for speeding up development. To be eligible, a medicine’s confirmatory trials must not yet have started. The Phase 3 trial began dosing on 10 September 2026, so that door has shut for this indication.

No UK trial. The Phase 3 trial is running at 47 centres in China. There has never been a UK or European site at any stage of the programme.

No expanded access or compassionate use. No programme of this kind has been found in any country.

No private route. A UK private prescription can only be written for a medicine that exists in a regulated supply chain. Rentosertib does not.

What would have to happen

A UK launch would need, in order: a trial programme that includes UK or European participants, a marketing authorisation from the MHRA, and then a funding decision from NICE for England, the SMC for Scotland or AWTTC for Wales. Prescribing would then sit with specialist interstitial lung disease centres. Each of those steps is set out in how a new medicine reaches NHS patients.

None of these steps has started.

A realistic timescale

The Phase 3 trial is due to complete in October 2029. The trial’s lead investigator, Professor Zuojun Xu of Peking Union Medical College Hospital, has said approval could follow three to four years after the Phase 3 start “under favourable conditions”. That estimate is for China, where the trial is running.

Add the time needed for a UK licence application and then an NHS funding assessment, and a UK launch before the early 2030s is not plausible. It may never happen at all. Most medicines that reach Phase 3 still fail, and the Phase 2a results carried a liver safety signal and a 22.5% discontinuation rate that the Phase 3 has been designed to examine.

If you are living with IPF now, the treatments that exist today are covered in IPF treatments available in the UK now.