REVIEW article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biomaterials
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvanced Functional Materials for Disease Diagnosis, Drug Delivery and Tissue Repair, Volume IIView all articles
Antibody–Drug Conjugates in Colorectal Cancer: Advances in Targeted Delivery and Personalized Oncology
Provisionally accepted
- 1Second Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, Dalian, China
- 2The First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, Dalian, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Colorectal cancer remains among the most prevalent gastrointestinal malignancies worldwide, imposing a substantial clinical burden and highlighting the urgent need for precision and personalized treatment strategies. Conventional drug delivery approaches are limited by low selectivity, restricted bioavailability, and systemic toxicity, thereby limiting therapeutic efficacy. Antibody–drug conjugates, as advanced delivery plat-forms, have the advantages of highly specific antibody recognition, versatile cytotoxic payloads, and continuously evolving linker technologies. This combination provides novel opportunities to increase efficacy, reduce toxicity, and enable individualized precision therapy. Recent advances have demonstrated the potential of ADCs in CRC, yet challenges such as resistance, toxicity, and clinical translation persist. Multidisciplinary efforts among the pharmaceutical industry and molecular biology and clinical medicine fields will be essential to accelerate the development of more precise and personalized CRC therapies. This review summarizes the current research progress on ADCs as a treatment option for CRC, discusses innovations in delivery system design, examines the key challenges of personalization, and highlights future directions to better integrate ADCs into effective treatment paradigms.
Keywords: Antibody–drug conjugates, colorectal cancer, Drug Delivery Systems, multimodal cancer treatment, personalized medicine
Received: 29 Nov 2025; Accepted: 22 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Wang, Yan, Xia, Chen, Pan, Zhang and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Yinan Zhang
Qianshi Zhang
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.