Putting an End to Heart Attacks by Editing Human DNA
By Angelica Peebles,
Bloomberg
| 05. 06. 2022
Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator,
CC BY 2.5 <>, via Wikimedia Commons
Even after decades of drug breakthroughs aimed at preventing heart attacks, they remain the world’s leading cause of death. The pills and injections on the market do the job of lowering the cholesterol that clogs blood vessels and puts people at risk of a heart attack. But not everyone has access to them, and some won’t stick to treatment plans that can last the rest of their lives. Verve Therapeutics Inc. is proposing a radical solution: altering a person’s genome—the body’s instruction manual—to stop the buildup of bad cholesterol. “We’re on the cusp of potentially transforming that model to a one-and-done treatment,” says Sekar Kathiresan, chief executive officer of the Cambridge, Mass.-based company.
Verve plans to initially target those who’ve already had a heart attack because of extremely high cholesterol caused by a hereditary condition known as familial hypercholesterolemia, which affects 31 million people globally. If it works to reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad,” cholesterol in that group, the company would look to widen the treatment... see more
Related Articles
Image by Avopeas, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that it would be irresponsible to perform heritable human genome editing – that is, to engineer the genes and traits of future children – unless and until “there is broad societal consensus about the appropriateness of the proposed application.” But how would we know if that goal had been achieved?
The only way to determine this would be through a robust process of public deliberation. Professional scientists...
Several new opinion polls on human biotechnology issues have recently come to our attention and two of them are discussed here. As is all too typical of polling on these complex matters, it is not clear that respondents were aware of, or informed about, key background information that would shield them from drawing false conclusions, as discussed below. (For summaries of these and older opinion polls on topics related to heritable human genome editing and cloning or genetically modifying animals...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 07.12.2022
A volunteer in New Zealand has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in order to lower their blood cholesterol, a step that may foreshadow wide use of the technology to prevent heart attacks.
The experiment, part of a...
By Carissa Wong, New Scientist | 07.01.2022
Photo by CDC on Unsplash
A new form of the genome-editing technique CRISPR could provide a more accurate way to edit mutations that cause genetic diseases. The approach, which was tested in fruit flies, fixes a genetic mutation on one...
