How Vertex Pharmaceuticals Succeeds with Serial Innovation

David Young: Welcome to C-Suite Perspectives, a signature series by The Conference Board. I'm David Young, the president at the Committee for Economic Development, the public policy center here at The Conference Board, and guest host of today's episode.

In today's conversation, we will discuss Leadership in Challenging Times, where we feature the outstanding CEOs who are the recipients of CED's Distinguished Leadership Awards for corporate citizenship and business stewardship.

Today, I have the distinct privilege of speaking with one of our 2025 honorees. Reshma Kewalramani, the CEO and president at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Under Reshma's leadership, Vertex is committed to supporting biomedical innovation, the next generation of scientists, and, indeed, the community. And just how they do all of that is what we'll be discussing today.

Reshma, welcome. An absolute delight to have you here today.

Reshma Kewalramani: Thank you so much, David. It's really a pleasure to be here.

David Young: So Reshma, you were born in India. You immigrated to the US when you were just 11 years old. You received your medical degree here in the US and went on to complete your general management program at Harvard Business School. You began your career as a physician, served in a variety of roles at Amgen for 12 years, and then you started at Vertex, I think in 2017.

And now you are the first female CEO of a top-tier US biotech company, a role that you started in April of 2020. And you've received numerous honors and awards for your leadership, including being named to the Time 100 Most Influential List and one of Fortune's Most Powerful Women. You're a Changemaker by CNBC and a top CEO by Barron's and one of Business Insider's top people transforming health care.

You have a remarkable story that is inspiring, I know, to me and to many, many others. Tell us just about your career, your path to leadership, and also some of the core values that you believe are important and instrumental to being a successful leader.

Reshma Kewalramani: I appreciate the kind words. I find it terribly embarrassing. You know, we are interesting as a society because we tend to recognize individuals, when the real truth is that all of the work that we do in Vertex and in many other settings is due to the team at play. It is 110% true about what's going on at Vertex. It is this amazing group of people and team.

I was indeed born and raised in India. Coming from a good Indian family, our parents told us that there were lots of options for careers, namely three: engineering medicine or the priesthood. And insofar as engineering and the priesthood did not interest me, medicine, it was.

And genuinely what I wanted to do with my life was be what is called a triple threat. Teach, see patients half a day a week, and run my lab. And then I realized that idea of making medicines for patients, that execution happens in the biopharmaceutical industry. And so I moved from academia to Amgen and then to Vertex to pursue this passion to make medicines for patients.

And I thought the pinnacle of that was to become a chief medical officer, a head of R&D. And that's what I aspired to. Becoming CEO was not something that I was thinking about. It's not an idea that I had rolling around in my mind. It is what happened in my desire to make medicines for patients

David Young: Reshma, you mentioned it's more than just one person. It's a team. You've built a very strong company culture at Vertex that prioritizes innovation and fostering a sense of belonging. consistently receiving recognition as one of the best places to work, including by Science Magazine, the Boston Globe, and Fortune.

Why do you think a strong company culture and values are so important for businesses today? And when you look at it, and when you reflect on it, what are some of the keys to nurturing a culture of innovation that can respond rapidly to change? Cause you certainly are working in an industry that requires rapid, rapid change.

Reshma Kewalramani: Yeah. You know, let me focus it on our industry, but this is applicable to industries around the globe and in many, many other sectors, for profit and not-for-profit.

In biopharma, which is the industry in which I work, failure is the norm. Ninety percent of projects that we start in our labs will not ever make it to being a medicine. That's how tough it is for what we do. And that kind of hard challenge is what most people face in the work that they do day to day. And when you are doing that kind of hard work, what is absolutely key is great people, values that everybody understands, and a great culture.

And it's important because innovation at its core means no one else has ever done it before. You're doing something for the first time. That's going to require an ability to accept failure and move on and do better the next time. It's going to require the absolute best ideas brought to the table, and it's going to require that the best talent is there. And that is all about values and culture, and I think it's particularly poignant in our industry because our industry is just that much harder. We are trying to tackle human health, and biology is a very difficult nut to crack.

So what we do here in terms of our culture to ensure that we have this kind of vibrancy where ideas are debated, hard problems are run towards, not run away from, is we talk about our history. We talk about our culture. We tell a lot of stories. We openly discuss our failures.

I'll give you one real important example, circa 2010 or so. Vertex made a medicine that was very, very important in a disease called hepatitis C, and it was one of the best medicines available. Vertex revenues went from zero to $1 billion in one year. That represents a blockbuster medicine. The very next year it went from $1 billion to zero. So it was the fastest medicine from zero to a billion of its time, and the fastest from a billion to zero of its time.

And what we really learned from that is this need to serially innovate, this need to not ever be complacent, the need to make sure that our strategy was sound and that our culture was sound. And we talk about that experience and what went wrong there to every new Vertexian that comes to our company. And I think culture is as simple as storytelling. You just have to do it clearly and frequently, and it has to be with all of the company—in our case, all Vertexians—it's not one person doing it in HR or the CEO doing it. This is genuinely about all people at the company.

David Young: I love that saying where you say, culture is as simple as storytelling. We're going to be right back after a short break with my conversation today with Reshma Kewalramani.

Welcome back to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm your host, David Young, the president of the Committee for Economic Development, the public policy center here at The Conference Board. I'm joined today by Reshma Kewalramani, the CEO and president of Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Welcome back.

Reshma, we've talked a bit already about Vertex's culture. It's clearly something that you are passionate about and you realize the importance of, but we know culture, as you said earlier, isn't just about one person. Can you tell us a little bit more about how Vertex goes about supporting its employees around the world?

Reshma Kewalramani: So for us, it starts even before you are an employee of Vertex. We have a very serious way in which we recruit and interview. We are painfully honest about who we are. We are a group of people who are relentless in our pursuit of excellence. We are 110% about our patients. We want to make medicines that either transform, if not cure, patients from their disease.

And we do so with this debate-oriented culture where it's a "best idea" kind of place, not a "my idea" kind of place. And we, therefore, recruit folks who want to work in that kind of environment when it comes to onboarding. We are very clear about our history, where we've come from and where we're going, and it's a lot about making sure that we tell our institutional stories to our new starters.

We do simple things like lemonade and pretzels where we literally eat pretzels and drink lemonade. Between 30 and 60 people come to lemonade and pretzels, and I spend an hour every four to eight weeks with another group of 40 to 60 people, and we talk about what's important to them. And, in a small-group session, talk about the company and where we're going. And we do bigger things, like training for aspiring managers, those who are in mid-management positions, and those who are at the VP and above level, the senior-most people. All of us can continue to learn and develop.

The last thing I'll give you as an example: I'm a very big fan of continuing to learn and continuing education, formally and informally. And we have a program here that we started about three years ago, where individuals from across disciplines can start to take classes at a local university, and those classes can even be translated into a full-on MBA, if that's what they wish to do, with full support from the company.

David Young: Wow. The next question touches a little bit, you've kind of elaborated on it already, but it looks at innovation and how you go about supporting innovation. At Vertex, you develop innovative medicines for some of the most serious diseases across multiple modalities, from small molecules to gene therapies, to cell therapies, and more. Each of the diseases you work on is unique and complex and, obviously, incredibly difficult to solve. How on earth is Vertex able to continue to push the envelope in terms of innovation in so many different areas?

Reshma Kewalramani: Yeah. Yeah. I am extremely proud of the work that we've done, the medicines we've invented, and the patients who have benefited from this work. At a high level, in three words, the drivers for this are our strategy, our culture, and our people. If I go a little bit beneath that high level, it's about our expectation that we are going to be innovators and, at that, serial innovators.

And the expectation is very clear that this does not extend to just R&D. This is about innovation in manufacturing. It's about innovation in access. It's innovation across the board. We like to say internally, we expect ourselves to make the impossible possible because patients are waiting.

David Young: Wow. To make the impossible possible. It's very, very ambitious and bold, and pretty inspiring. Now, beyond patients, you serve the broader community, as well, and you are big believers in this. In fact, you've been included on the Civic 50 which recognizes the 50 most community-minded companies in the nation each year.

What are some of your key initiatives with regards to the community, and how do you look at setting your philanthropic priorities for the initiatives that you support?

Reshma Kewalramani: Vertex has been the kind of company that is very proud of the places in which we live and work. And part of that pride has to do with giving back. And welcoming the community into what we do and being part of the community and supporting it. And my predecessor, Jeff Leiden, who's also a physician scientist, set the stage for this and set the priorities.

We are very interested in STEM—science, technology, engineering, math. And we do a lot, therefore, in STEM education for the youth in our community, as well as making sure that there is a vibrant ecosystem of others who want to participate in this, whether at the high school level or beyond that.

At our company here in Boston, and not so far from where you are in our Oxford research sites, as well as in our research site in San Diego, as an example, we bring in students from the public school system. And they come here, and they work alongside our scientists doing experiments. I think genuinely hands-on experimentation brings topics like chemistry and biology, that may not seem as thrilling as it is to me, to life, and I think brings a real passion.

So this idea of working in STEM, bringing students in from the community, and bringing our community in general is something that we do because our employees really enjoy it, and we think we're going to get great scientists and future Vertexians from these activities. In many ways, it's quite selfish.

David Young: Well, Reshma, thank you so much for joining us today. Your insights, your reflections, and also just sharing your inspirational story is deeply appreciated. So thank you, and we look forward to celebrating you and the Vertex team at CED's Distinguished Leadership Awards later this year in October in New York City.

So Reshma, thank you so much for sharing with us today. And thanks to all of you for listening to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm David Young, and this series has been brought to you by The Conference Board.