Just a few years ago researchers had naively hoped that they could design a drug to blast a single cancer-causing protein and send the disease into remission for years without forcing the patient to endure the side effects of prolonged toxic chemotherapy.

FORBES: Swiss Army Medicine

One notorious example came when just about every major drug company in the mid-1990s rushed to develop drugs to block a cancer-causing gene called ras.

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The drug emerged from a Ciba-Geigy lab in Switzerland after a decade of research into various cancer-causing genes.

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