Joshua Boger

Chemist with a Ph.D. from Harvard University who spent the 1980s in medicinal chemistry research at Merck before leaving to start Vertex.

Joshua Boger founded Vertex in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1989 on the idea that drugs could be designed from the three-dimensional structure of a target protein rather than found by large-scale random screening. He led the company as CEO until 2009, a period that covered its HIV protease inhibitor work with GlaxoSmithKline, the hepatitis C program that became INCIVEK, and the cystic fibrosis research collaboration that later produced KALYDECO. The early years of the company were chronicled in Barry Werth's 1994 book The Billion-Dollar Molecule.

Joshua Boger was born in 1951 in Concord. Education: Wesleyan University.