‘We’re still waiting’: As cystic fibrosis drugs deliver new hope, not everyone is being swept up by scientific progress

Josh Hillman, a 23-year-old Harvard Law student from Alabama, has cystic fibrosis, the progressive genetic disease that causes frequent lung infections and wears on other organs. He has to pop enzymes with every meal to maximize the nutrients his body absorbs. While he sleeps, 1,200 calories of a nutritional shake drip through a tube directly into his stomach. There are the inhaled drugs — sometimes antibiotics, always a mucus thinner — that he breathes in through a nebulizer, and a blue vest that slips on, inflates, and vibrates, a 30-minute shaking session that he does twice a day to help clear the mucus that gunks up his airway and lungs.