The company responded in an email that "while publicly funded academic research provided important early understanding of the cause of cystic fibrosis, it took Vertex scientists 14 years of their own research, funded mostly by the company, before the drug won approval. "The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving healthcare for people with cystic fibrosis, provided $150 million of the funding for the development for ivacaftor in exchange for royalty rights in the event that the medication was successfully developed and commercialized. In 2014, the Foundation sold these royalty rights for $3.3 billion. The Foundation has stated that it intends to spend these funds in support of further research.Vertex said it would make the medication available free to patients in the United States with no insurance and a household income of under $150,000. In 2012, 24 US doctors and researchers involved in the development of the medication wrote to Vertex to protest the price of the medication, which had been set at about $300,000 per year. In the UK, the company provided the medication free for a limited time for certain patients, then left the hospitals to decide whether to continue to pay for it for those patients.
Mechanism
The term compensatory is largely misleading, as it indicates that there is a compensatory mechanism that takes effect after sympathectomy, in which the body redirects the sweating from the palms or face to other areas of the body. Sweating after sympathetic surgery is a reflex cycle between the sympathetic system and the anterior portion of the hypothalamus. Reflex sweating will not happen if hand sweating can be stopped without interrupting sympathetic tone to the human brain.Compensatory hyperhidrosis is aberrant sympathetic nervous system functioning. The only study evaluating the total body sweat prior and shortly after sympathectomy concluded that patients produce more sweat after the surgery, just not so much in the areas treated by the surgery. Epidemiology
Of people that have a sympathectomy, it is impossible to predict who will end up with a more severe version of this disorder, as there is no link to gender, age or weight. There is no test or screening process that would enable doctors to predict who is more susceptible. == References ==