While the arrival of “individualized medicine” has been around for the past decade, the initial belief that targeted agents, such as Herceptin and Tykerb, would replace the traditional, and toxic, chemotherapy have been set aside. Now researchers are using various combinations of targeted agents and chemotherapy to achieve significant results. The idea that cancers should be treated according to their molecular makeup, and not where they occur in the body, has also given researchers the basis that these targeted agents can work in a variety of tumors. One of the interesting findings in the article is how cancer cell receptors “cross-talk,” which may explain drug resistance. We created a medical illustration showing how this may work.
