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Review

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 7, 505–516 (1 July 2006) | doi:10.1038/nrm1962

EGF–ERBB signalling: towards the systems level

Ami Citri & Yosef Yarden

Signalling through the ERBB/HER receptors is intricately involved in human cancer and already serves as a target for several cancer drugs. Because of its inherent complexity, it is useful to envision ERBB signalling as a bow-tie-configured, evolvable network, which shares modularity, redundancy and control circuits with robust biological and engineered systems. Because network fragility is an inevitable trade-off of robustness, systems-level understanding is expected to generate therapeutic opportunities to intercept aberrant network activation.