The handful of patients had severe heart disease that had caused chest pain and heart attacks.
After trying available cholesterol-lowering medications, they could not get their cholesterol as low as cardiologists recommended.
So they volunteered for an experimental cholesterol-lowering treatment using gene editing that was unlike anything tried in patients before.
Each had a genetic abnormality, familial hypercholesterolemia, that affects around one million people in the United States.
In the United States alone, more than 800,000 people have heart attacks each year.
Organizations:
Verve Therapeutics, American Heart Association
Locations:
Boston, United States