THERANOSTIC ANTIBODY-DRUG CONJUGATES: NEW FRONTIERS IN DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF CANCER

Abstract

Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are molecular systems that unlike classic chemotherapy hold the potential to change the nature of cancer treatment. ADCs combine both the advantages of highly specific targeting ability and highly potent killing effect to achieve accurate and efficient eradication of cancer cells.  Yet, the visualization of drug release event in "life" by fluorescence monitoring is emerging methodology and can provide a vital info about pharmacokinetics of ADCs. Fluorescent dyes linked to ADCs create theranostic (therapeutic and diagnostic) modalities that afford such a real-time info on the efficacy of drug delivery including quantitative monitoring of drug distribution. To achieve this goal, we equipped an ADCs with a turn-on near-infrared (NIR) dye, sensitive to drug release, and a reference NIR dye. The results suggest that our ratiometric design could be successfully employed for quantitative monitoring of drug release degree and the proposed method is unaffected by the experimental variation, as well as the variation in the mouse response to the administrated conjugate. The future aspects and insights of theranostic ADCs with improving therapeutic index will be discussed.