Vertex Pharmaceuticals Virtual Lab Tour

welcome to vertex at these labs we confront big problems by going super tiny making small changes that result in big outcomes hi I'm ginger Birnbaum I'm a CF patient advocate and I'm a CF mom I'm so glad that you're here today thanks ginger to date only a small percentage of the CF community have visited our labs so we created this virtual tour a way for everyone to meet the people of vertex first you're gonna need this coat hope it fits first stop chemistry here we work with tiny molecular structures hi there I'm Yoshi welcome to the chemistry lab I'm a medicinal chemist here and in medicinal chemistry we do chemistry for the goal of creating medicines we take small building blocks such as these and we bring them together to make larger molecules we have to make hundreds and thousands of these to create medicines time to get the molecular combinations from Yoshi and his team to archive management where they're stored and prepared for testing testing molecules like these allow us to identify the right compounds to address damaged proteins that cause diseases like cystic fibrosis with so many compounds and we have millions it's a challenge to store and manage each one of these don't be shy take a look we take these compounds store them in this system and ship it out for experiments that scientists are performing all across the world we're like a library or a mailroom but with way cooler tech to speed up the search for the right compounds we need to put as many samples as we can onto each of these plates hey how are you so you've seen where the compounds are stored now you can see the Saku stick works out where they're actually distributed to the scientist the system works by focusing acoustics on wave at the bottom of the plate which causes a droplet to eject from the surface and then a plate is held upside-down over which catches the droplet thanks Joe now it's time to test each compound on human tissue hi I'm Taylor and this is our human cell lab this is where we grow all of our human cells and large scale for production so this includes the human bronchial epithelial cells or the HBS which we mostly get from CF patient donation these important cell donations are critical to our research so we'll take care of these cells every single day for a period of five weeks before we're ready to test our compounds on them at that point we'll hand them over to other scientists to test these compounds and see how well they're working come on let's go see what else we can find around here sure let's show our visitors the IRD lab hey welcome to IRD this or a lot of the magic happens at vertex what happens when we need a research tool that we don't have we invent it we make a lot of custom instruments over here we have a 3d printer we use for rapid prototyping we also build our own electronics boards here here on the wall is a lot of our pens that we've done over the years so you can see here at vertex we think big but not only that we also go big so why don't I show you where we do that next Javier's right when it comes time for clinical trials we really need to go big hey how's it going welcome to the kilo left the kilos will we take compounds from milligram scale the kilogram scale using equipment such as this one right here kinda like cooking for hire people our synthesis takes us to this type of compound we send it out around the world for testing for the next step in our drug development process so glad you could join our tour as you can see it takes a village to make big things happen here but none of this would be possible without you the CF community [Music]

Channel: Vertex Pharmaceuticals

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Id: 2L4bBe599yY

Length: 3min 46sec (226 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020