Oncology

Efforts to develop antibodies that can ferry drugs into cancer cells and minimize damage to healthy tissue are gathering steam. The next generation of these ‘weaponized antibody’ therapies, called antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs), is working its way through clinical trials. The concept that underlies these drugs is simple, as they re-purpose an antibody as a vehicle to deliver a toxic drug into a cancer cell. When the antibody in an ADC seeks out and docks onto a tumour cell, the cell takes it up and cleaves the molecular links that bind the drug to the antibody. This frees the drug to kill the cell from within. Researchers have been chasing ADCs for decades. The US Foo...