Firm also slammed at home over profit
THE US firm Vertex, which is withholding Orkambi in the UK, was once slammed by American cystic fibrosis experts over pricing, it has emerged.
Chief executive Dr Jeff Leiden owns a string of waterfront homes in Massachusetts and Florida and is one of the country’s highest paid public company bosses.
But last year he was accused of trying to “blackmail” Britain by threatening to axe UK investment unless the products were bought at their price.
And in 2015, Vertex faced a barrage of damning criticism over the pricing policy of their life-saving drugs by 29 leading US medical experts.
Soared
The company won approval for the drug to be used – at a cost of £200,000 per patient each year – on half of the 30,000 CF patients in the United States.
Professor Paul Quinton of University of California, one of the critics, wrote: “It’s egregious. This is more than five times the annual salary of the average American family.
“How can they in good conscience charge that much? It seems wrong.”
He was particularly furious about Vertex’s board awarding more than £41million in 2017 in one-off bonuses to a dozen senior executives.
Prof Quinton added: “What we’ve done is essentially make the executives a bunch of millionaires.”
Dr Leiden was paid £35million in 2014 while the company’s profits soared by 40 per cent last year.