Verve Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that plans to use gene editing technology to treat heart disease, announced its official launch and $58.5 million in Series A financing on May 7.
The investment round was led by GV, the venture capital arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, with additional funding from ARCH Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital, and Biomatics Capital.
Sekar Kathiresan, MD, former director of the center for genomic medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, was named Verve's CEO, effective in July. The company has already secured partnerships with CRISPR-focused biotech company Beam Therapeutics and Alphabet's life sciences research subsidiary Verily, as well as MIT and Harvard University's Broad Institute for biomedical and genomic research.
Verve's mission is to use genetic analysis and genomic editing to discover and develop a one-time therapy that will protect adults at risk of coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S.
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