Can Sekar Kathiresan kill heart attacks?
Chennai: Dr Sekar Kathiresan, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Boston-based Verve Therapeutics, hails from a family that is genetically prone to heart attacks. Myocardial infarctions, as heart attacks are medically known, cause 32% of all deaths worldwide, and claimed the lives of his grandmother, uncle and elder brother. His father, too, had suffered a heart attack but survived.
It was this constant threat that drove the India-born doctor to become a cardiologist. Sek, as he is referred to by friends and colleagues, completed his medical studies in 1997. Not content with just treating cardiovascular disease (CVD), he immersed himself into genetics, in the hope of finding a way to prevent heart attacks.
In 2018, Sekar co-founded Verve Therapeutics with the goal of finding a way to permanently lower cholesterol. He aims to do this in a very different and more effective way—meaning, no more daily pills, constant monitoring of risk factors, or periodic hospital visits. The clinical stage startup is in the process of developing a single-dose gene-editing drug that will try to switch off the gene in the liver that causes elevated levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C).
“Verve was born out of the deep conviction that cholesterol can be lowered permanently," Sekar, 52, told Mint in a telephonic conversation from Boston in the early hours. On 12 November, Verve released its first early-stage human trial data. The next day the company’s stock was hammered on the bourses, crashing 40% to $8.66 on the Nasdaq.
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