The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has played an active role in the development of drugs for cancer treatment for over 40 years. This is reflected in the fact that approximately one half of the chemotherapeutic drugs currently used by oncologists for cancer treatment were discovered and/or developed at NCI.

The past two decades of biomedical research have yielded an enormous amount of information about the molecular events that take place during the development of cancer. With this added knowledge, scientists are creating new drugs such as Herceptin and Gleevec, that target the molecular alterations involved in the biological pathways important in cancer. The hope is that by targeting specific alterations in cancer cells, these innovative therapies will be more effective in killing tumor cells and less harmful to normal cells.