A Chemically Defined Trifunctional Antibody–Cytokine–Drug Conjugate with Potent Antitumor Activity

The combination of immunostimulatory agents with cytotoxic drugs is emerging as a promising approach for potentially curative tumor therapy, but advances in this field are hindered by the requirement of testing individual combination partners as single agents in dedicated clinical studies, often with suboptimal efficacy. Here we describe for the first time a novel multi-payload class of targeted drugs, the immunocytokine-drug conjugates (IDCs), which combine a tumor-homing antibody, a cytotoxic drug and a pro-inflammatory cytokine in the same molecular entity. In particular, the IL2 cytokine and the disulfide-linked maytansinoid DM1 microtubular inhibitor could be coupled to the F8 antibody, directed against the alternatively-spliced EDA domain of fibronectin, in a site-specific manner, yielding a chemically defined product with selective tumor homing performance and potent anticancer activity in vivo, as tested in two different immunocompetent mouse models.