Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is an American pharmaceutical company based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Vertex was founded in 1989 by Joshua Boger and Kevin J. Kinsella. Vertex is one of the first biotech companies to use explicit rational drug design strategies rather than combinatorial chemistry.
In 2004, its product pipeline focused on viral infections, inflammatory and autoimmune disorders, and cancer. It maintains its headquarters in South Boston, Massachusetts, and two research facilities, in San Diego, California, and Oxford, England. The start of the company was profiled by Barry Werth in the 1994 book Billion-Dollar Molecule and further development in his 2014 book, The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma . In 2009, the company has about 1,800 employees, including 1,200 in the Boston area.
In January 2014, Vertex completed its move from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Boston, Massachusetts, and took up residence in a new $ 800 million complex. Located on the South Boston coast, this will mark the first time in the company's history that all of the approximately 1,200 Vertex employees in the Greater Boston area will work together.
Since the end of 2011, when Jeffrey M. Leiden joined Vertex as CEO, Vertex has ranked among the top 15 performers in Standard & amp; Poor 500. Stock of the vertex increased by 250 percent over the same period. Vertex posted only one annual profit since its inception in 1989.
Video Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Telaprevir
In May 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the telaprevir (Incivek) drug, oral treatment for hepatitis C marketed by Vertex. The development and commercialization of telaprevir is shared with Johnson & amp; Johnson for European distribution and Mitsubishi for Asia. Telaprevir is a protease inhibitor.
Maps Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Cystic fibrosis
Ivacaftor
In 2012 ivacaftor, established as an orphan drug, identifies cystic fibrosis as affecting less than 200,000 people in the United States. On January 31, 2012, Vertex obtained FDA approval from the first drug, Kalydeco, to treat underlying causes of underlying cystic fibrosis, in patients 6 years or over who had a G551D gene mutation. In the US, 30,000 people have cystic fibrosis. About 4% of them, or 1,200, have G551D gene mutations. Vertex is marketing the drug at $ 307,000 per year per patient. Vertex is also studying ivacaftor in combination with other drugs (lumacaftor) for the most common mutation in CF, known as F508del, and expects the first set of results in 2012. Vertex worked for 13 years with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to develop the drug.
In the UK, the company provides free drugs for a limited time for certain patients, then leaves the hospital to decide whether to continue paying for the patient. Institutions in the UK estimate the cost per year of quality customized life (QALY) among Ã, Â £ 335,000 and Ã, £ 1,274,000 - well above the NICE threshold of Ã, Â £ 20,000 Ã, Â £ 30,000.
On November 5, 2014, Vertex announced the submission of a New Drug Application (NDA) to the FDA for a complete combination of lumacaftor and ivacaftor for people with cystic fibrosis age 12 and older who had two copies of the F508del mutation in transmembrane conductance regulator cystic fibrosis (CFTR ) genes. By 2015, the FDA approved Orcambi lumacaftor/ivacaftor to treat cystic fibrosis (CF) in patients 12 years and older, who have a F 508del mutation.
mRNA therapy
In 2016, the company entered into collaboration with Moderna to develop new mRNA-based therapies to treat CFs; Vertex paid Moderna $ 20 million in cash and provided an additional $ 20 million in exchange for cash to be exchanged on the record that Vertex can dilute the shares. Vertex also promised to pay up to $ 275 million in milestone payouts.
Venture philanthropy
In the late 1990s, Bethesda-based Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, encouraged by President Robert Beall, began investing in Vertex - when it was a newly established small biotechnology company - to help fund Kalydeco's development in the form of philanthropy. Total investment reaches $ 150 million. In 2014, the CF Foundation sold the rights to drug royalties worth $ 3.3 billion, twenty times the Foundation's budget in 2013.
By 2015, Kalydeco's annual cost has risen to over $ 300,000 per patient.
According to an article published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Vertex executives earned over $ 100 million by cashing in stocks and stock options and at one point the value of the company's stock increased by over $ 6 billion in one day. "
Twenty-nine doctors and scientists working with people with cystic fibrosis (CF) wrote to Jeff Leiden, CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals to apply for lower prices.
"We recognize the financial complexity of large expenditures for R & D in terms of a small number of patients or market systems that allow this progress to become reality, but - in spite of all your patient support programs - it is most inappropriate for Vertex to charge insurance plans of our patients (including unrestricted state medical aid plans), $ 294,000 annually for two pills a day (10-fold increase in total patient total medication cost).This act can be seen as a leverage of pain and suffering into huge financial gains for speculators , some of which are your top executives who are reportedly making millions of dollars in one day (Boston Globe, May 29). "
The company responded in an email that "while publicly funded academic research provides an important initial understanding of the causes of cystic fibrosis, Vertex scientists took 14 years of their own research, funded mostly by companies, before the drug was won."
On April 15, 2015 at Cambridge, MA, Joan Finnegan Brooks from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, talked about the role of Vertex and philanthropy efforts to the biotech leadership panel hosted by the Life Sciences Foundation on the topic of patient advocacy in the biotech industry. While Brooks, who has Cystic Fibrosis, expressed his gratitude for the development of Vertex from Kalydeco, he observed that 25% of Cystic Fibrosis patients did not get the medical care they needed because of the expensive drug costs.
See also
- Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
- Telaprevir
References
- Annual Report . Vertex Pharmaceuticals. March 15, 2004 . Retrieved June 24 2012 .
- "Vertex Completes New Drug Application for Telaprevir for Hepatitis C" (Press Release). Vertex Pharmaceuticals. 23 November 2010 . Retrieved June 24 2012 .
External links
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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