Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Vertex Pharmaceuticals is an American biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vertex was founded in 1989 by Joshua Boger. Vertex was one of the first biotech firms to use an explicit strategy of rational drug design rather than combinatorial chemistry. By 2004, its product pipeline focused on viral infections, inflammatory and autoimmune disorders, and cancer. It maintains headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and two research facilities, in San Diego, California, and Oxford, England. The company's beginnings were profiled by Barry Werth in the 1994 book The... Billion-Dollar Molecule. In 2009, the company had about 1,800 employees, including 1,200 of in the Boston area. In May 2011, the FDA approved drug telaprevir , an oral treatment for hepatitis C marketed by Vertex. Development and commercialization of telaprevir is shared with Johnson & Johnson for European distribution and Mitsubishi for Asia. Telaprevir is a protease inhibitor. January 31, 2012, Vertex gained FDA approval of the first drug, ivacaftor, to treat the underlying cause of Cystic Fibrosis rather than the symptoms, in patients over age 6 who have the G551D gene mutation.
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