Verve CEO interview: gene editing for heart disease, new data - Business Insider

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The buzzy biotech Verve is gearing up to test a gene-editing treatment that could cure heart disease. The CEO shares his 3-step vision for the one-and-done heart treatment.

Verve Therapeutics' lead experimental therapy, dubbed VERVE-101, aims to slash bad cholesterol levels and effectively cure patients with a serious genetic heart disease by editing a tiny piece of their DNA. Verve CEO and cofounder Dr. Sekar Kathiresan told Business Insider that's the first part of his three-step strategy in transforming how heart disease is treated.

Kathiresan, a prominent cardiologist, founded Verve while working as a researcher at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. After a lifetime of studying the heart and its related genetics, Kathiresan resigned from his positions to lead Verve, which was incubated by GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, from 2016 to 2018.

The biotech's first experimental treatment was built using tools from the biotech Beam Therapeutics called base editing technology. It's a more precise way to edit genes, allowing scientists to change a single letter of genetic code. These patients have abnormally high levels of LDL, or bad cholesterol from birth, which often result in overworked arteries. The ultimate result is young patients, often in their 30s or 40s, having heart attacks, strokes, and sometimes even dying.

Verve's partner Beam, for instance, went public in February 2020 at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Less than a year later, Beam's stock has increased more than 350%, with the biotech now worth well over $5 billion, despite having no treatments ready for testing in people. . The initial work in patients with this genetic heart condition is the first of three steps, Kathiresan said.The second phase will expand research to anybody with atherosclerotic heart disease, a group that Kathiresan estimated at about 24 million people in the US and Europe. That's a condition in which plaque builds up in arteries, narrowing them and potentially blocking blood flow or causing them to break.

 

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Well dont forget to trash Nature mag for politically spineless aryan nationalism, meanwhile in China , one of their own most NobelPrize worthy scientists Dr He Jiankui is in prison for Xi's nearly panicked defensiveness to welcome future tech.

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