Verily Partners With Newly Launched Verve to Improve Gene Editing Platform

Verily, the life-sciences sister company of Google, today announced a partnership with Verve Therapeutics. The move marks Verily’s first industry collaboration to leverage its nanoparticle research and development platform.

Verve Therapeutics, a biotechnology cardiovascular company, launched today to discover and develop therapies that safely edit the adult human genome to reduce a person’s risk of coronary artery disease. The company announced a $58.5 million Series A funding round, led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). Verve is building on genetic research conducted by its founders.

The collaboration between Verily and Verve aims to develop and optimize new gene editing delivery platforms. Gene editing, including CRISPR nucleases and base editors, could improve outcomes for individuals at an increased risk of diseases.

“We are thrilled to be applying our technology to a major health effort in partnership with a world-class team of experts in cardiovascular medicine and gene editing delivery technology,” Mark Audeh, nanoparticle program lead at Verily, wrote in the announcement.

The nanoparticle program is one of Verily’s first ever initiatives.

Verily’s team struggled with nanoparticle irreproducibility, and the commercially available products that the team worked with had inconsistent properties and could not be characterized sufficiently. So the company built a platform that allows the team to synthesize nanoparticle libraries using a combination of chemistries to generate a large number of unique formulations.

“We saw an opportunity to contribute meaningfully in this area, by developing a high-throughput synthesis and screening platform to engineer libraries of well-characterized nanoparticles with predictable properties at scale,” Audeh wrote.

Verily works on many projects to improve precision medicine in healthcare.

Currently, the company is supporting the development of the Data and Research Support Center for the All of Us research program.

Verily also launched a multi-year study in the Netherlands to explore the factors that could impact the course of Parkinson’s disease. The company wants to identify new biological markers that allow it to track the progression of the disease more sensitively and provide a foundation for new and personalized treatments.

Through precision medicine, scientists and researchers could better understand the path of a disease to improve outcomes and develop better medications for certain populations of people.

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