AXL and cancer: Coincident with clinical evidence linking TAMs with poor patient outcomes in cancer, there has been great interest in recent years to develop TAM therapeutics in the form of small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs,) antagonistic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and fusion proteins (Axl-Fc) that act as decoy receptor traps to neutralize TAM ligands, each of which has distinct modes of action and specific strengths and weaknesses.