Double Whammy Drug

In recent years, antibody-drug conjugates – a class of drug combining specific cancer-targeting antibodies with cell-killing toxins – have revolutionised cancer treatment and prolonged patient survival. And now there’s hope that these drugs will become even more effective thanks to something called click chemistry – a system that uses small molecular connectors to snap such drugs together once inside the body. The image above shows mouse pancreatic cancer cells containing two newly designed click-chemistry versions of the antibody-drug conjugates panitumumab and trastuzumab (green and pink). Researchers found that combining the two drugs in this way made them significantly more effective at targeting cancer cells and promoting survival of the animals than when the drugs were uncombined. Furthermore, the clicked drugs worked similarly in a variety of different cancer models. Given that both drugs are already approved as treatments, it’s hoped their clickable versions will readily translate to clinical use too.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Shayla Shmuel. Relating to article by Cristina Simó and colleagues
• Department of Radiology, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, USA
• Image originally published as 'Credit must be given to the creator' equating to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Nature, July 2026