Biography

Sekar Kathiresan is co-founder and chief executive officer of Verve Therapeutics. He is also a member of the company’s board of directors. Dr. Kathiresan is a preventive cardiologist who has made groundbreaking discoveries of cardioprotective genetic mutations, which confer resistance to cardiovascular disease. Prior to joining Verve, he served as director of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Genomic Medicine and was the Ofer and Shelly Nemirovsky MGH Research Scholar. He also served as director of the Cardiovascular Disease Initiative at the Broad Institute and was professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kathiresan’s research laboratory focused on understanding the inherited basis for blood lipids and myocardial infarction and using these insights to improve preventive cardiac care. Among his scientific contributions, Dr. Kathiresan has helped highlight new biological mechanisms underlying heart attack, discovered mutations that protect against heart attack risk, and developed a genetic test for personalized heart attack prevention. For his research contributions, he has been honored with a Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Heart Association and the 2018 Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics. In tandem with his research, his clinical focus was the primary prevention of myocardial infarction in individuals with a family history of heart attack. Dr. Kathiresan graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed his clinical training in internal medicine and cardiology at MGH and his postdoctoral research training in human genetics at the Framingham Heart Study and the Broad Institute.