The serendipitous discovery of ETS family gene fusions in common prostate carcinoma [7, 8], and of ALK and ROS kinase fusions in lung cancer [9, 10] through transcriptomic and proteomic approaches, bypassing chromosomal analyses, provided a strong fillip to the search for gene fusions in common solid cancers and pointed to alternative approaches to gene fusion discovery. Here, ALK is linked to lung carcinoma.