Alphabet has been pouring money into life sciences research through its venture investing arm GV and through Verily, its experimental health-technology division.

Now, GV and Verily are coming together to work with a start-up called Verve Therapeutics with an aim to reduce people's risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. Verve is setting out to develop an injectable treatment so millions of people no longer have to rely on a daily regimen of pills.

For Alphabet, Verve represents a potential path to revenue in one of its most important early-stage science projects incubated in X (formerly Google X), the research and development lab that was also home to Waymo's self-driving cars, Wing's delivery drones and the Chronicle cybersecurity project.

Verily became an independent company under the Alphabet umbrella in 2016, and last year raised $1 billion in outside capital in a funding round let by private equity firm Silver Lake. The bulk of its projects, from surgical robotics to clinical research studies, are still in the research stage, but the company will start coming under increased pressure to commericialize its technology and produce a return. Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat joined the Verily board at the time of the Silver Lake deal.

Verily announced the partnership with Verve last week alongside a $60 million financing, mostly from GV.

In its early days, Verily was known as Google Life Sciences. One of its projects was focused on nanoparticles, or tiny particles that can be used to help make drug treatments more targeted. Google had a group of engineers and scientists working on the technology for years. Verily said in a blog post that it began the research to find new ways to treat disease, including with potentially new drugs.

"This was one of the very earliest science programs at Google Life Sciences, back when it was part of Google X," said Dr. Jessica Mega, Verily's chief medical officer and a practicing cardiologist. While Alphabet is best known for online advertising, "we can do basic science, and we're actually well positioned to do it," she said