ALK and cancer: Anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) is a clinical target of major interest in adult cancers characterized by chromosomal translocations (Hallberg and Palmer, 2013) in which the ALK kinase domain is fused to an array of amino-terminal partners, such as EML-4 (Rikova et al., 2007; Soda et al., 2007) in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) (Awad and Shaw, 2014), or NPM (Morris et al., 1994) in anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL).