Indications, not platforms, drive growth at Vertex

Vertex has spent the last three years building capabilities across new modalities, but the company isn’t taking a platform approach to pipeline expansion. Its growth strategy centers on choosing the right diseases, then identifying technologies to match. 

The company’s first criterion for disease selection is the need for minimal investment in sales and marketing, allowing its resources to be deployed in the R&D budget to fuel continual innovation. It’s also constraining its search by requiring a clear understanding of the disease mechanism and, ideally, the possibility of an expedited approval pathway...