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From: Tumor heterogeneity as a driver of drug resistance and its implications for personalized therapy
Figure 3. Three primary mechanisms of resistance to tumor-targeted therapy. (A) Modifications or alterations to the target itself can impair the specificity of targeted drugs; (B) Following inhibition of the tumor target, downstream signaling pathways may be activated by compensatory alternative routes. Tumors may also rely on the compensatory activation of other survival-related pathways to offset the effects of blocked target-associated signaling; (C) Tumors may undergo a series of phenotypic changes and acquire additional traits that enable them to become completely independent of the target, thereby rendering the original targeted therapy ineffective. Created in BioRender. Da, E. (2026) https://BioRender.com/ryuh0ks.
