Targeted cancer therapies use drugs to more precisely identify and attack cancer cells, based on a person’s genes, as compared to traditional cancer treatments. As such, targeted cancer therapies are sometimes called “molecularly targeted drugs” or “molecularly targeted therapies” and allow for a more precision medicine approach.

In addition to being molecularly-focused, targeted therapies are often cytostatic (which means they block tumor cell proliferation), whereas standard chemotherapy agents are cytotoxic (which means they kill tumor cells). Therefore, many targeted drugs go after the mechanisms that make cancer cells different than normal cells and leave the healthy cells alone.