Felicia Pagliuca, PhD

Felicia Pagliuca, PhD, is vice president and disease area executive for type 1 diabetes at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston. She leads development of the company's stem cell derived islet replacement therapies and sits on the Vertex Cell and Genetic Therapies leadership team. She co-founded Semma Therapeutics and, as its vice president of cell biology research and development, drove the manufacture of stem cell derived islets before Vertex acquired Semma in 2019. She earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. In a postdoctoral fellowship with Doug Melton at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, she was a co-inventor of stem cell derived islets. That science became zimislecel, the allogeneic islet therapy tested in the VX-880 Phase 1/2 trial and reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2025 as restoring insulin production.

Affiliation

Scientist-Executive, Vertex

Location

Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.