Jump­ing in­to grow­ing queue of buy­ers, Ver­tex chief tar­gets a slate of new and 'larg­er' deals ahead

Af­ter mak­ing it crys­tal clear that Jeff Lei­den plans to keep his hand di­rect­ly on the wheel of busi­ness de­vel­op­ment fol­low­ing his move from CEO to the ex­ec­u­tive chair­man’s spot, Lei­den him­self stepped up on Wednes­day to per­son­al­ly map out plans for a se­ries of new deals he ex­pects to or­ches­trate to beef up the pipeline.

Dur­ing the Q2 call with an­a­lysts, Lei­den her­ald­ed the near-term ap­proval ex­pect­ed for their triple com­bi­na­tion for cys­tic fi­bro­sis. And he made it abun­dant­ly clear that a string of new deals re­gard­ing gene edit­ing pro­grams for Duchenne mus­cu­lar dy­s­tro­phy — buy­ing Ex­on­ics and more — are just a pre­lude to more M&A pacts in the very near fu­ture as Resh­ma Ke­wal­ra­mani preps a move to the CEO suite.

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