A plan to ‘eradicate’ heart disease with CRISPR

As ambitious mission statements go, Verve Therapeutics’ is right up there: The just-formed company wants to use genome editing to permanently protect patients from coronary artery disease, upending decades of medical practice and rendering standard treatments obsolete.

As STAT’s Sharon Begley reports, Verve isn’t yet close to running a clinical trial, let alone revolutionizing cardiology. But the idea was enough to convince Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, a well-regarded cardiologist, to quit his job running the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and become Verve’s CEO. And a group of investors led by GV bought into Verve’s $58.5 million seed round.

Now come the hurdles. First, Verve will have to prove that its approach is safe enough to supplant decades-old medicines with strong track records. Then there’s the small matter of actually editing enough cells to have an effect. And, even if everything goes to plan, the company would have to compete in a cardiovascular market where costly therapies, even when they work, struggle to make a dent commercially.

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