Pharmacogenomics and the Failing Heart

摘要

In Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot, the characters wait by a country roadside for a person named Godot, who never arrives (1). Godot's conspicuous absence throughout the play has fostered a variety of diiferent religious, philosophical, and psychoanalytical interpretations, and has led to the use of the phrase "waiting for Godot" as an expression for waiting for someone or something that will never arrive. Over the past several years, a series of intriguing observations has arisen with regard to the role genetic variations (polymorphisms) in signaling pathways that contribute to disease progression in the failing heart (2,3). These observations have given rise to the hope that information regarding genetic polymorphisms might be harnessed to develop personalized therapeutic strategies for patients with heart failure. However, this type of genetic information has not been clinically useful thus far, insofar as many of the genetic associations that have been reported have not been independently replicated