Gene therapy for heart failure

Novel strategies are needed to treat the growing population of heart failure patients. While new drug and device based therapies have improved outcomes over the past several decades, heart failure patients continue to experience amongst the lowest quality of life of any chronic disease, high likelihood of being hospitalized and marked reduction in survival. Better understanding of many of the basic mechanisms involved in the development of heart failure has helped identify abnormalities that could potentially be targeted by gene transfer. Despite success in experimental animal models, translating gene transfer strategies from the laboratory to the clinic remains at an early stage. This review provides an introduction to gene transfer as a therapy for treating heart failure, describes some of the many factors that need to be addressed in order for it to be successful and discusses some of the recent studies that have been carried out in heart failure patients. Insights from these studies highlight both the enormous promise of gene transfer and the obstacles that still need to be overcome for this treatment approach to be successful.