Vertex makes another bet on the future

Fair or otherwise, a lot of the conversation about Vertex Pharmaceuticals focuses not on the company’s $4 billion-a-year cystic fibrosis business but rather on just what the company will look like when those patents inevitably expire. Yesterday, we learned that the future Vertex will be digging into neurological disease.

The Boston company signed a deal with a firm called Ribometrix to partner on drugs that target RNA, and the first target is Huntington’s disease, a rare and devastating neurodegenerative disease.

The RNA-focused deal comes about a month after Vertex agreed to pay nearly $1 billion for Semma Therapeutics, an early-stage startup trying to turn stem cells into a curative treatment for type 1 diabetes. And both agreements fit alongside the company’s recent pipeline-expanding moves, focused on unproven technologies that could have dramatic effects on serious disease. So far this year, Vertex has invested in CRISPR genome editing and synthetic messenger RNA.