# Mechanism-of-action recovery and known-biology probes

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/mechanism-of-action-recovery/  
OnCo record `mechanism-of-action-recovery` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

A model that claims to have learned biology should, without being told, point at the known mechanism of a known drug or the known marker of a known cell type; recovering such known biology is an orthogonal check that a correlation is not an artefact.

## Summary

A drug's mechanism of action is the specific biochemical interaction through which it produces its effect, usually naming its molecular target (Wikipedia). For a drug-response or perturbation model, ranking the MEK pathway genes first for a MEK inhibitor, or HER2 and its amplicon for trastuzumab, is a probe that costs nothing and catches models that learned tissue or batch instead. The same logic underlies tertiary lymphoid structures as a probe for spatial models and responder-versus-non-responder framing as the application that matters.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: mechanism-of-action recovery; MoA recovery; recovers known biology; known-biology probe; known-biology probes; biological sanity check; responder versus non-responder biomarker
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/moa-recovery.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action

## Connected records

- terms: [Ablation study and multi-task heads](https://onco.cc/terms/ablation-study/), [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS)](https://onco.cc/terms/tertiary-lymphoid-structures/), [Virtual cell models and in-silico perturbation screens](https://onco.cc/terms/virtual-cell-models/)
- pathways: [RAS / RAF / MEK / ERK (MAPK)](https://onco.cc/pathways/ras-mapk/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/mechanism-of-action-recovery.json