text: Most diseases are heterogeneous in cause, meaning that one "disease" is often many different diseases at the molecular level, though symptoms exhibited and response to treatment may be identical.  How diseases of different molecular origin respond to treatments is partially addressed in the discipline of pharmacogenomics.
  Not listed here are the many kinds of cancers involving aberrant transcriptional regulation owing to creation of chimeric genes through pathological chromosomal translocation. Importantly, intervention in the number or structure of promoter-bound proteins is one key to treating a disease without affecting expression of unrelated genes sharing elements with the target gene. Some genes whose change is not desirable are capable of influencing the potential of a cell to become cancerous.