Why Cystic Fibrosis is the best story in Medicine and why you should care.
About Cystic Fibrosis (CF)
CF is a rare, life-shortening genetic disease affecting approximately 75,000 people in North America, Europe and Australia. CF is caused by a defective or missing protein resulting from mutations in a particular gene. Children must inherit two of these defective genes — one from each parent — to have CF. There are approximately 2,000 known mutations in the CF causing gene which makes funding research particularly challenging. CF causes chronic lung infections and progressive lung damage that eventually leads to death. Historically, children with CF died as infants but with the breakthroughs in medicine in the past two decades, the median age of death is now in the mid-to-late 20s.
Corporate America’s Collaborative History with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation – the better mousetrap.
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation initiated and funded a CF research program in 2000 as part of a collaboration with Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Break through drugs have been discovered by Vertex as a consequence of this collaboration that treat the underlying cause of the disease and offer hope and brighter futures to people living with cystic fibrosis.