Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated

Type	Corporation
Traded as	NASDAQ: VRTX NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component
Industry	Pharmaceuticals & Biotherapeutics)
Founded	1989
Headquarters	Boston, Massachusetts
Key people	Jeffrey Leiden, M.D., Ph.D., Chair, President and CEO Stuart A. Arbuckle, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Kenneth L. Horton, Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer Lisa Kelly-Croswell, Senior Vice President, Human Resources David Altshuler, M.D., Ph.D., Executive Vice President, Global Research, and Chief Scientific Officer Megan Pace, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications Amit K. Sachdev, Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Public Policy Ian F. Smith, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Products	Product Pipeline]
Revenue	US$1.4 billion (2011)
Website	www.vrtx.com

Vertex Pharmaceuticals is an American Pharmaceutical company based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Vertex was founded in 1989 by Joshua Boger and Kevin J. Kinsella. 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 South Boston, 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 and its further development in his 2014 book, The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma. In 2009, the company had about 1,800 employees, including 1,200 in the Boston area.

In January 2014, Vertex completed its move from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Boston, Massachusetts, and took residence in a new, $800 million complex. Located on the South Boston waterfront, it will mark the first time in the company's history that all of the roughly 1,200 Vertex employees in the Greater Boston area will be working together.

Since late 2011, when Jeffrey M. Leiden joined Vertex as CEO, Vertex has ranked among the top 15 best performing companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500. Vertex shares increased 250 percent in the same period. Vertex posted only one annual profit since it was founded in 1989.

In May 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug telaprevir (Incivek), 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.

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