Building or investing in the antibody-drug conjugate market?

ADCs are one of the hottest areas in cancer drugs right now, and the money is following the newer platforms.

We've found a lot of interesting signals. For example, Gilead bought Tubulis, a German ADC startup, for $3.15B upfront and up to $5B in total, and closed the deal in May 2026. That same month, the FDA approved Enhertu for early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer, both before and after surgery. Big pharma is paying for the next generation of ADC technology, and these drugs are reaching patients earlier in their disease.

In this section, we look at why ADCs are drawing so much money now, which targets and payloads buyers want most, and what deals this size mean for smaller platform companies.

Chemotherapy hits healthy cells along with the tumor. ADCs promise to aim the poison better, but many patients still face serious side effects.

We compare six types of ADC companies, from integrated drug developers to antibody, linker and payload platforms and the teams behind new conjugation methods. Their buyers range from big pharma oncology teams to biotechs that license a platform. Then we rank their biggest pains, like side effects that cap the dose, tumors that stop responding, and molecules that are hard to make the same way every time.

This shows which problems drug makers will pay a platform to solve, and which ones they prefer to handle in-house.

Drug sales, licensing deals with upfront cash and milestones, platform fees per program, royalties and outright sales to big pharma: ADC companies make money in very different ways.

We compare who pays, when the money arrives and what each model costs. A drug developer keeps the upside but pays for years of trials. A linker or payload platform can sign many partners, yet most of its money arrives only if their drugs succeed. Manufacturing adds its own costs, because toxic payloads need dedicated sites. And Chinese biotechs now license many of their ADCs to Western drug makers, which changes how deals are priced.

You'll see when licensing out a platform is worth more than owning a drug, and when it's the other way around.

Strong trial data explains part of the growth, not all of it. Here, we go through what actually drives the ADC market.

Some drivers are plain to see: more approvals, use in earlier stages of cancer, and big pharma needing new drugs as older patents run out. Others feed each other. Each approved ADC shows which targets and payloads work, which makes the next deal easier to sign. Better linkers allow stronger doses with fewer side effects. And pairing ADCs with immunotherapy opens new uses, as it already has in bladder cancer.

Before building or investing, you should know what it takes for an ADC to beat the treatments doctors already trust, and to be made safely at scale.

Daiichi Sankyo and Seagen, now part of Pfizer, built the ADCs most people know, but they're only part of the story.

Some of the most interesting ADC players are little known. A few only make linkers or payloads and license them to many drug makers. Others attach the drug at one exact spot on the antibody so every molecule comes out the same, or design payloads that wake up the immune system instead of only killing cells.

They're hard to spot because their work often carries someone else's name. A linker from a small platform can end up inside a big pharma drug, and the deal terms are rarely public. Many of the newest ADCs also come from Chinese biotechs that few people in the West have heard of.

Below, you'll find the market grids and ecosystem maps we've built to show who makes which part of an ADC, and where newer teams are getting in.

Kelun-Biotech, DualityBio, Synaffix… a few ADC companies have turned their technology into approvals, big partnerships or a strong exit. They took very different paths.

Kelun-Biotech won approvals in China and licensed its TROP2 ADC to Merck for most of the world. DualityBio built a pipeline of ADCs, signed partners like BioNTech and went public in Hong Kong. Synaffix licensed its linker and conjugation technology to many drug makers before Lonza bought it. No single route has proven best.

We'll look at how these teams chose between owning drugs and licensing parts, and picked partners who could take their ADCs to patients.