《Antibody targeted drugs as cancer therapeutics》.pdf

R E V I E W S Antibody targeted drugs as cancer therapeutics § David Schrama*, Ralph A. Reisfeld and Jürgen C. Becker* Abstract | Treatment of cancer is a double-edged sword: it should be as aggressive as possible to completely destroy the tumour, but it is precisely this aggressiveness which often causes severe side effects — a reason why some promising therapeutics can not be applied systemically. In addition, therapeutics such as cytokines that physiologically function in a para- or autocrine fashion require a locally enhanced level to exert their effect appropriately. An elegant way to accumulate therapeutic agents at the tumour site is their conjugation/ fusion to tumour-specific antibodies. Here, we discuss recent preclinical and clinical data for antibody–drug conjugates and fusion proteins with a special focus on drug components that exert their antitumour effects through normal biological processes. The first description of a disease resembling cancer is Paul Ehrlich envisioned antibodies as ‘magic bullets’ that found in an Egyptian papyri and dates back to approxi- would specifically trace and kill microbes and tumour mately 1600 bc. Nevertheless, until the nineteenth cells3. However, it was not