Targeted cancer therapy relies on the concept of oncogene addiction, where cancer co-opts molecules to drive multiple aspects of cancer biology.

“It really relied on this idea concept and the term oncogene addiction, when did I first hear that? I suppose it was in the early 2000s. This idea that by a cancer co-opting this one molecule, it's actually now essentially using it to drive kind of more components of cancer biology than you would have thought in terms of the normal physiologic role of that molecule and where there's compensatory mechanisms and parallel processing that can happen in normal cells that make it not so dependent on the function of that one molecule.”