How Targeted Therapy Works for Cancer

Targeted drugs are really drugs that are trying to hit a particular, either a target itself, or a particular pathway. And so there are lots of different forms of targeted therapies.

For example, one form of a targeted therapy can be some cancers express a certain protein on their surface. And so sometimes we have antibodies that target that protein and can shut off the signal that's driving that cancer cell to grow from that protein. Whereas there are other targeted drugs that are targeting a particular pathway that's turned on. And so if you give a targeted drug, you are turning off that signaling pathway in the cell.

You know, it's a pretty revolutionary concept. Because you know, back in the olden days, the major form of therapy that we had for cancer was really standard chemotherapy, which most chemotherapy is really targeting rapidly dividing cells. It's not that it's specific to a particular target on the cancer cell. And so this is pretty revolutionary, because this means that, one, we can understand what is driving a particular cancer cell to grow, and we can target it in different ways.

And it's pretty incredible when you can personalize treatment for a patient by understanding their individual cancer and be able to give them these targeted drugs, which sometimes can work just so incredibly well. It is a nice change.