What is molecular targeted therapy?

The essence of malignant tumors is uncontrolled cell growth and differentiation. Except for the mutation of some genes that control cell growth and differentiation and thus the proteins encoded by them are different from normal cells, malignant tumor cells still retain the characteristics of normal cells in many aspects. Therefore, it is difficult to distinguish normal cells from malignant cells in traditional treatment, such as chemotherapy, which kills malignant tumor cells while killing normal cells because it cannot distinguish normal cells. For example, chemotherapy, while killing malignant tumor cells, also kills normal cells because it cannot distinguish between normal cells. The disadvantage of this kind of “enemy and me” treatment is that the efficacy is not high enough and the toxic side effects are great. Modern tumor treatment requires killing tumor cells to the maximum extent while protecting normal tissues as much as possible. Targeted therapy is a treatment that targets specific molecular targets of tumor cells, which play an important role in tumorigenesis, growth, metabolism, signal transduction, apoptosis, etc., and thus have relatively little effect on normal cells. Since the first molecularly targeted therapeutic drug rituximab was launched, there are now dozens of molecularly targeted therapeutic drugs in clinical application. Molecular targeted therapy is the future direction of tumor treatment development, which greatly enriches the treatment means of malignant tumors and brings new hope to tumor patients.