World Antibody-Drug Conjugate Summit, October 15-16, 2013, San Francisco, CA.

The World Antibody-Drug Conjugate (WADC) Summits organized by Hanson Wade are currently the largest meetings fully dedicated to ADCs. The first global ADC Summit was organized in Boston in October 2010. Since 2011, two WADC are held every year in Frankfurt and San Francisco, respectively.

Challenges in the development and manufacturing of antibody-drug conjugates.

Advances in antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) will permit sensitive discrimination between healthy and cancer cells. Promising clinical results generated much hope that this targeted prodrug therapy will offer more effective treatment options to patients. Manufacturing such highly potent biopharmaceuticals presents a series of unique challenges.

Antibody-drug conjugates: linking cytotoxic payloads to monoclonal antibodies.

Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) combine the specificity of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) with the potency of cytotoxic molecules, thereby taking advantage of the best characteristics of both components. Along with the development of the mAbs and cytotoxins, the design of chemical linkers to covalently bind these building blocks is making rapid progress but remains challenging. Recent advances have resulted in linkers having increased stability in the bloodstream while allowing efficient payload release within the tumor cell.