At Vertex, we believe the most important medicines are those that have transformative impact for patients. And while drug discovery and development are complicated processes, learning about our approach and the diseases in our pipeline doesn’t have to be...which is why we’re excited to launch our new animated video series, “Vertex Forward: Illustrating our Scientific Strategy.” The first video that we’re sharing today explains our research philosophy and why we build our drug discovery programs in a unique way — to maximize their chances of bringing dramatic improvements to patients' lives.
Our research strategy aims to combine advances in the understanding of human disease and in the science of therapeutics to dramatically improve human health. That’s why we choose to work on serious diseases where we understand the underlying biology or we have a unique insight that we think allows us to potentially have an impact on disease in patients. As a physician-scientist, I know that success in discovering novel treatments is rare and hard-earned.
Throughout my career I have been driven to understand and treat human disease. This is why I spent 20 years in academia working to discover the genetic causes of human disease and why I joined Vertex as its Chief Scientific Officer five years ago. It is also why this video series is important to us — as it provides the opportunity to share our learnings and strategy with the scientific community, patient communities and more.
Further, we are committed to replicating our success in cystic fibrosis with other serious diseases and using it as a model for how we approach all our programs. By taking this disciplined, scientific approach to some of the most serious challenges in medicine, and by bringing rigor and creativity to how we address them, we can hopefully improve the health of many patients. In the coming months, we’ll share additional videos from this series to provide a glimpse into each disease within our pipeline, its underlying cause, and how we are working to invent potential treatments for each.
We hope you enjoy these videos, and we look forward to sharing more on YouTube and vrtx.com later this year.