Dr Amit Khera, MD, MSc

Cardiologist, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Associate Director of the Precision Medicine Unit, MGH Center for Genomic Medicine, and Associate Director of the Cardiovascular Disease Initiative at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Boston, USA

Amit V. Khera, MD MSc, is a cardiologist, human geneticist, and biotech drug developer. He is the Vice President of Genomic Medicine at Verve Therapeutics, cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

At Verve Therapeutics, Amit is leading the clinical development of an in vivo base editing medicine to inactive the ANGPTL3 gene in the liver and thereby durably—or even permanently—lower circulating LDL cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations in high-risk patients.

He received his MD with Alpha Omega Alpha distinction from the University of Pennsylvania and went on to complete clinical training in Internal Medicine and cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. He completed a Masters of Science from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a postdoctoral research fellowship inhuman genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Among his scientific contributions, he has used genetic variation as a tool to uncover new drug targets and enable enhanced clinical care informed by inherited susceptibility. He pioneered use of a new approach to quantify genetic risk (‘genome-wide polygenic scores’) for common diseases, developed biomarkers of HDL (‘good’) cholesterol function and healthy fat distribution that provided new biologic insights, and analyzed large-scale gene sequencing data to highlight key pathways driving risk and identify molecular subtypes of cardiometabolic diseases. In tandem with his research efforts, he founded a Preventive Genomics Clinic while at MGH to provide a clinical infrastructure for genome-first medicine and led efforts to understand the impact of such work on patient-level outcomes via analyses of clinical and patient-reported measures.

Dr. Khera has authored more than 140 scientific publications, including lead or senior-authored publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, Cell, and Nature Genetics.