Drugmaker Eli Lilly plans to buy Verve Therapeutics, a gene-editing startup, for about $1 billion upfront. The deal gives Lilly a potential new treatment for heart disease, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Eli Lilly will buy Boston-based Verve Therapeutics, Inc. in a billion dollar deal with plans to advance Verve's new line of experimental cardiac health drugs.

The deal centers around a medicine that could “shift the treatment paradigm for cardiovascular disease,” Lilly said, but also follows a yearslong decline in Verve’s share price amid skepticism over the need for such a therapy.