Killing the cancer while keeping the patient healthy: ADCs

Brian Murphy

Reading Time: 2 minutes

One of the opportunities for personalized medicine is that by targeting a disease, can you eliminate the side effects of the cure?

Characterization of Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs)
A monoclonal antibody conjugated with two ADCs.

Antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) are one next-generation therapeutic approach that may have an answer.

As the Cleveland Clinic notes, “Chemotherapy, the only form of treatment available for treating some cancers, destroys cancer cells and harms healthy cells at the same time. A promising new approach for advanced cancer selectively delivers cytotoxic agents to tumor cells while avoiding normal, healthy tissue.” In fact, the Cleveland Clinic has named ADCs as one of the most promising medical innovations for 2015.

For scientists designing antibody drug conjugates – optimizing the monoclonal antibody (mAb), the toxic small-molecule drug, its linker technology, and how they act in concert – characterization provides one of the most difficult analytical challenges.

While analytical technologies have rapidly advanced to make biopharmaceutical characterization more routine, ADC researchers need to additionally determine the critical quality attributes of an ADC such as drug-to-antibody ratio, conjugation site, and determination of load distribution.

In this new educational video, we provide a 3D illustration of how ADCs are constructed, and how liquid chromatography (LC) and mass spectrometry (MS) technologies are applied to characterize ADCs, using authentic analytical data.

Learn more about Waters’ solutions for ADC characterization.