Welcoming The "Era Of ADCs"

For Loretta Itri, M.D., pursuing medicine has been her dream since she was 5 years old and watching her father, a general practitioner, and her mother, a nurse, treat patients out of their home in Brooklyn, New York. Dr. Itri’s professional journey has taken her from bedside patient care to engaging in global clinical and commercial strategy for biopharma companies across the space.

When she was the chief medical officer (CMO) at Immunomedics, Dr. Itri helped shepherd TRODELVY®️, a first-in-class antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer, through late-stage development to market. ADCs, antibodies with a chemotherapeutic payload attached by a linker, work by targeting the antigens on the surfaces of tumors. The three primary elements that comprise an ADC—antibody, payload, and linker—each come with their own challenges when designing and optimizing an ADC for quality, safety, and manufacturability. In an episode of The Business of Biotech podcast, Dr. Itri sat down to explore the path to commercialization as well as the promise of TRODELVY and other ADCs as transformative treatments for a range of malignancies and intractable diseases.