Health History | Vertex — Structure-Based Design After the Merck Lab
· 1989-1
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Health History | Vertex — Structure-Based Design After the Merck Lab
kevin
People treat Vertex as a Fan Pier campus that always sold cystic-fibrosis tablets from a Boston waterfront tower.
The first rooms were in Cambridge.
On 4 January 1989 Joshua S. Boger incorporated Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Massachusetts. Boger had spent a decade at Merck Sharp and Dohme, ending as senior director of basic chemistry. He left with colleague Manuel Navia to try structure-based design as an independent book.
Early offices sat on Waverly Street in Cambridge. Barry Werth later described those years in The Billion-Dollar Molecule. The first programs chased an HIV protease inhibitor and other enzyme targets. Telaprevir for hepatitis C and ivacaftor for cystic fibrosis came much later.
In January 2014 the company finished its move from Cambridge to 50 Northern Avenue on Fan Pier. The public view is the Harborwalk and the glass frontage on Northern Avenue, not the labs.
The mechanism is a lock read before a key is cut. Instead of screening libraries first, the founders started from the shape of a target protein and designed a small molecule to fit it.
This pin is the Seaport campus the firm occupies now. The 1989 filing was a Cambridge corporation. The visible pilgrimage stop is the building that collected those rooms on the water.
Photo: public view of the Boston Seaport, via Wikimedia Commons.
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