Vertex Pharmaceuticals expands drug discovery collaboration with Genomics

Vertex Pharmaceuticals announced a three-year extension of its collaboration with healthcare company Genomics to use human genetics and machine learning to improve the discovery and development of new precision medicines. The partnership, which began in 2018, was previously extended in 2021. The collaboration will now run until 2026. The companies have been working together to support Vertex’s efforts to develop transformative medicines for serious diseases. To date, Genomics’ work has focused on using improved understanding of human genetics to pinpoint causal disease pathways and processes, and to identify novel targets in known and newly identified pathways. As part of the extension, Genomics will expand the range of genomic insights it uses to support this work and expand the number of therapeutic areas under study. The partnership will now also explore using Genomics’ proprietary genetic tools to improve identification of patient populations and to de-risk the selection of biomarkers for measuring early readout of drug efficacy.