Word: vertex
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...It’s important to keep a sense of humor if you want office behavior to change,” said Vicky Sato ’68, president of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company...
...seen collaborations with companies for research drop by nearly half from 2000. Such stark figures should give Summers pause before he starts intertwining Harvard research with the work of biotech companies. Indeed, Harvard has always been hesitant to associate itself too closely with for-profit companies. Cambridge-based Vertex Phamaceuticals, which includes former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy R. Knowles on its scientific advisory board, tried to name itself “Veritas” when it was founded in 1989. Knowles, however, interceded and convinced the company of the “sensitivity, the horror...
Because a protein's structure is essential to its function, those proteins that perform similar functions often have stretches where they are similarly shaped. Instead of focusing on the structure of just one target, Vertex homes in on entire families of proteins as it seeks out its leads. This is done by crystallizing a protein of interest and exposing it to intense X-ray beams. The way those beams are scattered reveals how atoms along the molecule's length are arranged--information that is converted into a protein structure by computers. Chemists use this structure to digitally model molecules that...
...nuts and bolts of its discovery strategy are not radically new. Vertex essentially finds the structures of its target proteins and designs molecules that slip selectively into the grooves found along the proteins' surfaces. It did this expertly in designing the anti-HIV drug Agenerase, which it promotes with GlaxoSmithKline. A handful of other firms have developed their own drugs in similar ways...
...only things flowing out of digital technology and into biotech; plenty of high-end hardware and software are following the money. The pursuit of new drugs through genomics and proteomics requires the gathering and sifting of oceanic volumes of data about molecules and their reactions to one another. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, for example, simulates 47 billion reactions between drugs and proteins a day--nearly as many as the number of e-mails sent out in the world every week. This requires the massive deployment of supercomputers and highly sophisticated programming tools--all key elements of a booming field dubbed bioinformatics...