Heart failure has been becoming more and more important since the number of patients of heart failure has been rapidly increasing all over the world. The treatments for heart failure including drug and non-drug treatments have been improved substantially. However, its prognosis is still poor, because the treatments for heart failure are all symptomatic treatments but not causal therapy. Development of novel therapies based on the mechanisms of heart failure is necessary to enable complete cure. It has been proposed for more than 40 years that cardiac hypertrophy is adaptive response to hemodynamic overload and that failure of its adaptation induces heart failure. However, the mechanisms of its failure have remained elusive. In this plenary session, molecular mechanisms of heart failure such as chronic inflammation and abnormal metabolism will be discussed.