Two rooms, two panels, one conference. On June 25, "The Next Generation of ADCs: Building Kinder, Gentler Cancer Therapeutics" drew a strong crowd to talk about antibody-drug conjugates: payloads, linkers, tolerability. The word "gentler" is right there in the title, and it's not an accident.
It's the ADC field's current north star: keep the tumor-killing power of the payload, reduce the collateral damage to the patient. It's a worthy goal and a real clinical problem. It's also, notably, a chemistry problem, not a biology problem.
Three days earlier, in a different room, Ben Zeskind, co-founder, president and CEO of Immuneering, was describing something that got a lot less conference buzz and deserves a lot more: a decision about where in a signaling pathway to intervene, which turned into a 17-month clinical benefit in first-line pancreatic cancer against a historical baseline of about seven months. Immuneering targets the RAF-MEK/MAPK pathway, but rather than hitting it where everyone else does, they went further downstream to MEK, on the logic that tumors have a much harder time growing around a blockade positioned there. As a bonus, patients kept their weight and muscle mass: the wasting that pancreatic cancer patients typically suffer didn't happen, because the mechanism itself avoids triggering it.
"One room was asking how do we make the same mechanism hurt less. The other was asking what happens if we hit this pathway somewhere we haven't been hitting it. Only one of those questions has a ceiling."
On the contrast between the two BIO 2026 rooms
Payload and linker chemistry is where the ADC field keeps looking because it's where the field knows how to look. Better linkers, cleaner payload release, reduced off-target toxicity: these are real, fundable, patentable improvements, and nobody should dismiss the clinical value of a drug that's easier for a patient to tolerate. But tolerability improvements on an already-validated mechanism have a ceiling, and that ceiling is set by the biology underneath the chemistry, not by how clever the linker gets. You can only make a mediocre mechanism so gentle before "gentler" stops mattering because the drug still isn't working well enough.
Pathway position is a different kind of lever entirely, and it's the one Immuneering pulled. It's not a formulation question. It's a "where in the cascade does this cancer actually become vulnerable" question, and it can change the efficacy number itself, not just the side-effect profile sitting next to it. Immuneering didn't need a novel target to get there. MAPK signaling is about as validated as oncology biology gets. They needed a better answer to where.
This is where I'd push back on how a lot of ADC-focused capital is currently being deployed. If your thesis is "we found a marginally better linker for a mechanism six other companies already validated," you are funding chemistry, and chemistry improvements are real but incremental by nature. If your thesis is "we found a fundamentally different point of biological intervention that changes what the drug can do," you are funding biology, and that's where outsized clinical results actually come from. Both are legitimate investment categories. They are not the same category, and the returns profile is not the same either.
"Kinder, gentler" is a great marketing line for a payload upgrade. It is not, by itself, a strategy for beating a crowded field.
The question every oncology check-writer should ask first
At Scimitar, Akira Robinson serves as Partner, Commercialization. He operates at the intersection of commercial strategy, launch execution, and market access, advising biopharma executive teams at critical moments where launch readiness directly determines asset value and time to market. With 20 years of experience across life sciences, diagnostics, biologics, and digital medicine, his work tackles complex commercial challenges for teams across the US and globally. His expertise spans the full commercial value chain—including launch planning, licensing, market access, pricing, analytics, marketing, sales distribution, and patient services across therapy areas, including: oncology, radiopharmaceuticals (RLT), rare disease, CNS, cardiology, and gastroenterology.
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