Treatment designed to act on a specific biological molecule, pathway, cell feature, or disease mechanism involved in a particular condition.
Targeted therapy is particularly important in cancer treatment, where medicines may be designed to interfere with molecular abnormalities that help cancer cells grow, divide, survive, or spread. Examples include medicines that target specific receptors, enzymes, or signaling pathways.
Because targeted therapies act on particular biological features, they may affect normal cells less broadly than some traditional treatments. However, they are not free of side effects, and their effectiveness depends on whether the relevant target is present and remains important to the disease.
COMMONLY CONFUSED WITH
- Chemotherapy: generally refers to medicines that kill or inhibit rapidly dividing cells without necessarily targeting a specific molecular abnormality.
- Immunotherapy: works by modifying or harnessing the immune system, although some treatments can overlap conceptually with targeted therapy.
SEE ALSO
