ABSTRACT
KEY WORDS: antibodies, carcinoma, radioimmunoconjugates, chemoimmunoconjugates, immunotoxins
The major problem for treatment of cancer is that treatment should be as aggressive as possible to kill all tumor cells while at the same time this aggressiveness often causes severe side effects. Indeed, due to the side effects many therapeutics cannot be applied at the desired doses, or some even cannot be applied systemically. In addition, therapeutics like cytokines require a locally enhanced level to exert their effect appropriately. Hence, recent therapeutic strategies try to target the tumor more specically. In this regard, monoclonal antibodies can be used to achieve this aim, either as naked antibodies or as drug-carriers, that is, fusion of drugs to tumorspecic antibodies. In fact, all different kinds of agents have already been fused to tumor-specic antibodies. Here, we discuss recent preclinical and clinical data of both naked antibodies and drug-antibody-fusion proteins.
