One of my biggest fears is dying of a heart attack and I absolutely hate the fact that you have no idea when it’s about to occur. Right now, my arteries could be clogged at 99% and I wouldn’t know it until I drop dead tomorrow. But in the near future such concerns may go away. Thanks to a new gene editing serum capable of preventing the body from producing cholesterol, thereby making it impossible to ever get a heart attack.
As Futurism puts it:
“If a new experiment is to be believed, a single gene-editing injection could someday eliminate the risk of heart disease.
Doctors from the biotech company Verve Therapeutics injected 13 monkeys with a serum that shut off two particular genes in their livers responsible for producing cholesterol and triglyceride fats, The New York Times reports. If the same could be accomplished in humans, scientists suspect that for many people, heart disease and fatal heart attacks could become relics of the past…
The idea would be to inject young people in order to gene-hack them so that they can go about life free of heart disease. Unfortunately for older generations, heart attacks and other conditions can be the result of decades-worth of high cholesterol filling their veins with plaque.
The serum…switches off two genes: PCSK9, which regulates LDL cholesterol — that’s the bad kind — and ANGPTL3, which regulates triglycerides, a type of fat that can be stored in the blood.
It will be years before the team can repeat the experiment in humans, the NYT reports, because they need to observe the monkeys for any potential side effects from the gene alteration and to see if the effect is permanent or not.”
But if the research proves promising with no long-term side effects then this could be a real game changer, especially in places like America that are already dealing with an influx of heart disease cases thanks to an ongoing obesity epidemic.
Is a Gene-Editing Serum the Greatest Idea Ever?
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