One of the most exciting developments in recent cancer treatment has been the move away from crude cytotoxic agents toward drugs that inhibit specific targets in specific cellular pathways. One assumption of this strategy is that maintenance of human cancers is dependent upon a limited cadre of therapeutically tractable oncogenic lesions. In this issue of Cancer Cell, an intriguing paper from Sharma et al. endorses this approach by showing that evolution appears to be working for us. They show that an innate asymmetry in the dynamics of intracellular signaling biases pathway inhibition in favor of cell death. This bias may significantly potentiate targeted cancer therapies.
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