Every night before bed, retired school teacher Paul Graves takes 4 pills that help keep him alive. The medication is Gleevec (imatinib), and it has kept Graves' chronic myeloid leukemia in remission for 4 years with virtually no side effects.

"I say, 'This is my surgery, this is my radiation, this is my chemotherapy,'" said Graves, who turns 67 next month. "It's absolutely amazing when you think of people losing their hair and losing body parts -- it's a miracle drug."

Graves is living the promise of so-called targeted therapy, a new approach to taming cancer. Its goal: to kill cancer cells while leaving healthy cells relatively unharmed. Gleevec is just one of a slew of targeted therapy drugs being developed to tackle some of the most difficult and deadly cancers.

Targeted therapy is "one of the most exciting new themes in cancer therapy," according to Jos? Baselga, MD, chief of the medical oncology service and director of medical oncology, hematology, and radiation oncology at Barcelona's Vall d'Hebron University Hospital. Baselga discussed advances in the field at the recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Atlanta.