£14m pay for drug boss in NHS price row

THE boss of a firm behind a cystic fibrosis drug which is too expensive for the NHS was paid £14.4 million last year.

A letter sent to shareholders before the Vertex Pharmaceuticals annual meeting showed that chief executive Jeff Leiden received 81 times more than the average company employee.

The firm, which is based in Boston, Massachusetts, produces the drug Orkambi, which could benefit 40 per cent of the 10,400 children and young adults in the UK suffering from cystic fibrosis.

Vertex asked for £105,000 per patient per year for the drug, but the NHS says the price is not value for money.

Mr Leiden’s pay deal is enough to fund a one-year course of the life-saving drug for 144 patients. And it is up £1.2 million on the £13.2million he earned last year.

The NHS offered his company £500 million over five years, with the option of extending to ten years and £1 billion, to have access to Orkambi and similar drugs.

Vertex declined the offer and although negotiations have resumed, no progress has been reported.

Emily Birchall is campaigning with the organisation Just Treatment for fair-priced access to Orkambi in the UK. Her son Jack is two and a half and could benefit from the drug if it could be prescribed by the NHS. ‘As the mother of a child with cystic fibrosis these numbers make me sick,’ she told The Guardian.

‘My child and thousands of others across the UK are denied access to life-changing medicines while Vertex’s chief executive, Jeff Leiden, gets richer and richer through a pricing strategy that holds children’s lives to ransom.

‘It is clear that lives matter less to Vertex executives than their pay packets.

‘If the current negotiations fail, I would urge [Health Secretary] Matt Hancock to use his legal power to take away Vertex’s monopoly so the NHS can buy an affordable, generic version of Orkambi for my child and all eligible cystic fibrosis patients in the UK.’

A Vertex spokesman said: ‘More than 90 per cent of our executive compensation is based on the performance of the company and our executive compensation was overwhelmingly approved last year by more than 95 per cent of shareholders.

‘We measure performance by our ability to discover and develop precision medicines for people with serious diseases.’

The spokesman added: ‘The prices of our medicines are based on the innovation and value they bring to patients and the significant investment we make to develop these and future treatments, and are not related to executive compensation.’