Top Reads, Listens & Follows of the week
Antibody-Drug Conjugates
Takeaways:
Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally and will account for ~600,000 deaths in the United States this year. The use of chemotherapy began in the 1940s and has been used since to kill cancerous cells. Unfortunately, chemotherapy has significant side effects on patients and can kill the growth of healthy cells and tissue. Since the late 1960s, traditional chemotherapy has accounted for >37% of cancer prescriptions and more than half of prescriptions for patients with colorectal, pancreatic, ovarian, and stomach cancers.
In the late 1990s, a smart-chemotherapy was developed that uses antibodies to locate cancerous cells and deliver chemotherapy directly into these cells, avoiding the collateral damage of traditional chemotherapy. These innovative antibodies are called antibody-drug conjugates (ADC’s) and were first approved for leukemia in 2000. It has taken 20 years for these ADC’s to be fine tuned to target more complex, solid tumors. In the past two years, 87 smart-chemotherapy ADC’s have entered development and large bio-pharma companies are making significant investments to advance the technologies. The focus is now shifting to earlier lines of treatment and may completely replace traditional chemotherapy to kill other solid tumors in the future. Science is incredible.
Reads: If you have trouble accessing some of these reads, try this
LeBron James’s Agent Is Transforming the Business of Basketball (here)
The United States of Bed Bath & Beyond by Ben Hunt (here)
Lux Capital Q1 2023 letter by Josh Wolfe (here)
Listens:
Expert Witnesses in gang-related cases by Michael Lewis (here)
Rob Huberty, Navy SEAL and founder of ZeroEyes, on entrepreneurship and life (here)
Amy Falls, CIO at Northwestern University, on endowment investing (here)
Evan Tindell, CIO of Bireme Capital, on poker and value investing (here)
Follow, Watch & Other great content:
60 Minutes: Military contract price gouging by Defense Contractors (here)