The interpretation of cancer as a genetic disease has provided the rational basis for developing new weapons to fight it, by searching for molecular alterations that play a key role in the neoplastic transformation of the cell and the maintenance of its proliferative activity. At the turn of this century, molecular cancer therapy emerged, making a neoplasm with a generally fatal course - chronic myeloid leukaemia - into a disease compatible with an almost normal life. Today, some 20 years on, there are now many cancers that can benefit from personalised treatments with significantly prolonged patient survival. With volume XI of Medicine and Oncology, the long journey that began with the dawn of life has come to an end: an impassioned journey that has recounted the many achievements over the centuries to preserve human health, and which concludes with an examination of the most recent and spectacular therapeutic advances, obtained thanks to the possibility - provided by new and sophisticated technologies - of sequencing the human genome and, therefore, of studying neoplastic disease in greater depth. Nevertheless, research does not stop here. The foundations have now been laid to trust in new advances in improving the specificity of molecularly targeted drugs and in the development of therapeutic mRNA cancer vaccines, in the wake of the success of preventive vaccines against COVID-19. Everything is presented with the usual lucid clarity of exposition, aided by numerous images that enhance the text, making it even easier to understand.