Could ADCs be the hot new thing in 2024?
Antibody Drug Conjugates or ADCs are now so sufficiently optimised to work that their clinical performance is becoming something of an admiration game. A surprise for 2024? Not really. Just before 2023 ended, Merck did a monster $22B deal with Daiichi Sankyo in October 2023 to co-develop and commercialise 3 ADCs targeting HER3, B7-H3 and CDH6. BMS, not wishing to lag behind in this arena, started 2023 with a potential $1B Tubulis partnership to develop “a selected number of highly differentiated ADCs to treat solid tumors” and ended December 2023 with a whopping $8.4B ADC deal with SystImmune. It seems ADCs are never far from big pharma’s radars. Then at JPM2024, Johnson & Johnson led the early 2024 charge with the M&A news of acquiring Ambrx to design and develop next-generation ADCs for just under $2B. So, keep your eye on ADCs in the coming months. As Daiichi Sankyo’s CEO Ken Keller said, ” something that was thought of as old has truly become the hot new thing. And now that we’ve cracked the code on these ADCs, the sky’s the limit.”