First Person Dosed in Novel Gene Editing Clinical Trial

The biotech company Verve Therapeutics launched the study with the aim of using base editing to treat a genetic condition that causes high cholesterol and increases a person's risk of developing cardiovascular disease.

Written byAmanda Heidt

| 4 min read

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A gloved hand holds a tweezer and pulls a section of DNA away from a double helix

Image credit:© iStock.com, vchal

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Update (November 7): The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today announced a hold on Verve Therapeutics’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application, according to a press release. The federal agency will be sending a list of questions within 30 days, and Verve “intends to work closely with the FDA to resolve the hold as promptly as possible in order to initiate dosing in the U.S.” The company recently completed a first round of dosing in three patients in New Zealand and the UK, and reported no drug-related adverse effects. An independent Data Safety Monitoring Board reviewed safety data from the first cohort and recommended that the trial proceed to a second, higher dosage.

Verve Therapeutics announced today (July 12) that it has dosed the first participant in a clinical trial assessing the safety and tolerability of the gene editing platform VERVE-101, which uses a precise kind of gene editing called ...

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Meet the Author

Amanda Heidt
Amanda first began dabbling in scicom as a master’s student studying marine science at Moss Landing Marine Labs, where she edited the student blog and interned at a local NPR station. She enjoyed that process of demystifying science so much that after receiving her degree in 2019, she went straight into a second master’s program in science communication at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Formerly an intern at The Scientist, Amanda joined the team as a staff reporter and editor in 2021 and oversaw the publication’s internship program, assigned and edited the Foundations, Scientist to Watch, and Short Lit columns, and contributed original reporting across the publication. Amanda’s stories often focus on issues of equity and representation in academia, and she brings this same commitment to DEI to the Science Writers Association of the Rocky Mountains and to the board of the National Association of Science Writers, which she has served on since 2022. She is currently based in the outdoor playground that is Moab, Utah. Read more of her work at www.amandaheidt.com.
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