MIT Department of Biology: Vertex Day

The Department of Biology at MIT is pleased to host the third annual Vertex Day on Wednesday, September 30, 2009. Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., Dr. Mark Murcko, will speak at 11:00 a.m. in the Broad Institute auditorium (NE30-Room 1154). We look forward to building the relationship between Vertex and the Department of Biology. In the very near future, we will be selecting two Biology graduate students to receive Vertex graduate fellowships from the Department.

Dr. Murcko's talk is titled: "Hype versus reality in pharmaceutical R&D"

Dr. Murcko is responsible for the strategic evaluation, identification, and integration of new, disruptive technologies into worldwide research and development. He joined Vertex as a Founding Scientist in 1990 and started the company's molecular modeling, bioinformatics, IS and chemoinformatics groups. He is a co-inventor of Vertex's first two marketed drugs, Agenerase^® and Lexiva^®, both HIV protease inhibitors, as well as several other development candidates in the Vertex pipeline, including Telaprevir^®, our HCV protease inhibitor currently in Phase 3 clinical trials. Prior to Vertex, Mark was at Merck in West Point, PA from 1987 to 1990. At Merck, he helped discover multiple clinical candidates against cardiovascular and ocular diseases, including inhibitors of the enzyme carbonic anhydrase for the treatment of glaucoma. One of Merck's development candidates in this area, Trusopt®, became the first marketed drug in pharmaceutical history to result from a structure-based drug design program. Mark is a co-inventor on more than 40 issued patents, has co-authored more than 85 scientific articles, and has delivered more than 120 invited lectures. He currently sits on the scientific advisory boards of several outside companies and has been an editorial board member for many scientific journals including the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Mark received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Yale in 1987.

For more information contact Linda Earle at lkn[at]mit.edu or 617-324-2297.