An Overview of Antibody Drug Conjugates and Their Use in Cancer Treatment

Kirollos Hanna, PharmD, BCPS, BCOP, explains antibody drug conjugates and their method of action. This video was filmed March 12 at the Hematology/Oncology Pharmacists Association 2020 Meeting in Tampa, Florida.

Kirollos Hanna, PharmD, BCPS, BCOP: So, a new excited class are antibody drug conjugates. Really, when you look at these agents, it's really a way to take cytotoxic chemotherapy, or systemic chemotherapy, and make it somewhat more targeted. I think when you look at how we deliver cancer therapies historically, we've had systemic chemotherapy that we generally administer to patients and we still do administer to patients. But now there's really this big push with targeted therapies, such as the small molecules we have—so the TKIs. We also have immunotherapies, monoclonal antibodies. So really what an antibody drug conjugate is a way to take a monoclonal antibody that's targeted against the specific antigen that's been identified in a specific cancer, and then you bind to it some type of cytotoxic component. So then that antibody can help direct that cytotoxic component to get to where it needs to, and then once it gets to that cancer cell, actually the entire compound is internalized within the cell, and the cytotoxic entity, or moiety, will break off and then have an effect.