Thinking on ADC linkers

In the chemical world, the tiny hyphen in antibody-drug conjugates—or ADCs, as they’re commonly known—does a lot more work than the perfunctory punctuation suggests. That hyphen stands for the chemical linker that ties an ADC’s tumor-targeting antibody to its cytotoxic drug. While linkers may seem like little more than chemical tethers, ADC makers are discovering that linker chemistry has an important role to play in these cancer therapies . The ADC concept has been around since the early 1900s, but it took nearly a century for the first ADC to make it to market. To date, 11 ADCs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration are on the market, and 266 ADC drug candidates are being actively tested in clinical trials around the world, according to Hanson Wade’s Beacon platform , which provides information about clinical trials. In theory, ADCs selectively kill tumor cells, sparing healthy cells: The antibody