The production of hadrons containing heavy quarks as well as the fragmentation of dense nuclear matter clusters accompanied by an increase in the yield of heavy flavor particles can be studied at the energies of colliding nuclei in the NICA collider. The concept of a vertex detector based on silicon pixel detectors was therefore developed for the effective registration of short-lived particles in the Multi-Purpose Detector (MPD) experiment at the NICA collider. Estimates of the main characteristics of this vertex detector are obtained.