Verve Has Top Cardio-Geneticist, $58.5M to Aim CRISPR at Heart Attacks
Summary
Prominent cardiologist and geneticist Sekar Kathiresan is heading up a new company, Verve Therapeutics, that will develop gene-altering medicine to prevent heart attacks. “Imagine an injection, once in life, that safely confers enduring protection against heart attack in adults,” said Kathiresan, the director of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. They have a relatively new option known as PCSK9 inhibitors, approved in 2015, but Verve believes the limitations of those drugs—initial high costs that have forced their makers to reduce prices , and the need to inject them regularly for a lifetime—will open to the door to a one-time genetic fix. “We know the targets are relevant from the human experience,” said Burt Adelman, Verve cofounder and chairman and a former R&D chief at Biogen (NASDAQ: BIIB ). The company’s chief scientific advisor, Kiran Musunuru of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent years exploring the positive effects of silencing the PCSK9 gene .
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