Part I: Milestones in personalised medicine--imatinib.

1represents a fundamental milestone in the development of this targeted treatment and marks the beginning of what is now known as the “imatinib era”. Three main fi ndings from this study were: imatinib (then known as CGP57148B) was a fairly specifi c kinase inhibitor; inhibition of the kinase activity of BCR-ABL was able to selectively block the proliferation of BCR-ABL-transformed cells in vitro and to slow down the growth of BCRABL-expressing cells in vivo; and imatinib was preferentially active in leukaemic cells versus normal colony-forming-unit ganulocyte macrophages and burstforming unit-erythroids. This important contribution to the development of imatinib as a targeted treatment did not develop in a vacuum, because the possibility of targeting BCR-ABLkinase activity had already been proposed in 1993 by Anafi and colleagues.