A drug company has won a High Court ruling that the processes of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) lack transparency. NICE will have to reconsider its guidelines for treatments to prevent fractures in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis.

Mr Justice Holman said that the advisory body on drug spending in the NHS in England and Wales had merely gone “through the motions so they could claim they had done their duty” in trying to get consent to disclose confidential material to the company and patient groups.

Servier Laboratories, which makes the drug strontium ranelate (Protelos), challenged guidance that it said unfairly restricted access to the treatment for NHS patients.

NICE had refused to disclose the full economic model on which its cost-benefit analysis …