What is the difference between chemotherapy and targeted therapy?

What is the difference between chemotherapy and targeted therapy? So chemotherapy generally we think of as being poisons or chemicals that we infuse into your body to kill cancer cells. This was generally the theory that poisons that killed off rapidly growing cells would also kill off rapidly growing cancer cells. So typically chemotherapy causes people to lose their blood counts, lose their hair, to be bald, to get mouth sores, diarrhea and just look like our stereotypical bald, skinny, pale chemo patient. Targeted therapies are ones that don't have the same toxicities. They are specifically targeted at your chemia cells or your cancer cells. So there's something about the cell, a marker or a protein or a mutation that your cancer cells have that your other cells don't have. Therefore, when we give the targeted therapy, it's not destroying normal blood cells and causing a lot of side effects and hair loss. It is only hopefully going in like a bullet and a missile targeting only those cells and therefore they're highly effective. We've shown in some of the trials for acute myeloid leukemia that targeted therapy can effective than even high dose cytotoxic chemotherapy for patients with AML. So the new error is to hopefully reduce or minimize the amount of cytotoxic poisons that you're getting and really focus on lower dose chemo and targeted therapy that in some cases works even better and in many cases is a pill. So it also frees you up from having to go in and get infusions. I think that's the future of AML therapy and because the majority of patients treated and diagnosed for AML are in their late 60s, 70s and even 80s, the development of these strategies has allowed us increasingly to treat patients who even a few years ago we would have just sent straight to hospice.