There’s an encouraging new possibility for heart failure patients:

Doctors will inject participants with harmless viruses that ferry a gene called SERCA2a into their heart muscle. The gene codes for a protein that recycles calcium within heart muscle cells, vital for driving each heartbeat and priming the next one.

In damaged cells, this recycling is impaired. By loading new copies of the gene the aim is to compensate for this decline. “The gene therapy will reset the calcium control,” says Lyon.

A preliminary trial of the same therapy three years ago in 39 people demonstrated that it is safe and delivers benefits. Those who got the highest dose of the virus, for example, spent only a tenth as long in hospital as those given a placebo.

Heart failure is a nasty disease, and one a lot of people misunderstand. It sounds a lot like other sorts of heart problems such as heart attacks or cardiac arrest, but it’s not. Heart failure is a longer slog in which the person gets weaker and weaker, and it’s more difficult to treat.

My father died of heart failure many many years ago, in the 1970s. He was not a very old man, and yet he was a very sick man. At the time there wasn’t a whole lot medical science could do for him. Now there’s a lot more that can be done for people with the same affliction. Perhaps soon there will be more.