Last week Verve Therapeutics dosed the first patient with a candidate treatment for hypercholesterolemia. This is exciting news for a couple of reasons. First, the technology used: CRISPR 2.0, i.e., base-editing is hitting the clinic (see the news in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery). Second, this is a leap forward into common diseases (“CRISPR for the masses”, says The Washington Post) and a training session for the real challenge, which is to “stop the biggest killer on Earth”, cardiovascular disease (MIT Technology Review).
![nanoparticle MIT[1423]](https://mycrispr.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/nanoparticle-mit1423.jpg)
Suppose you have developed the winning weapon to defeat certain genetic diseases by reliably correcting pathogenic mutations. There is still a problem: how do you march onto the battlefield, inside sick cells? The weapon is the genome-editing machinery, and the most efficient vessel ever tested are lipid nanoparticles. With this approach, described in a study published in 
CRISPeR FRENZY 