Extreme Hydrophobicity of Cytotoxic Drugs Enables Design of Next Generation Antibody-Drug Conjugates Nanotherapeutics

Abstract

Antibody and protein-drug conjugates (XDCs) have emerged as promising cancer therapeutics, yet their clinical utility remains constrained by dose-limiting toxicities and narrow therapeutic windows. These safety challenges stem primarily from two factors: premature payload release during systemic circulation, and poor physicochemical properties inherent to the hydrophobic cytotoxic drugs they carry. Prior strategies attempted to address these limitations by appending water-soluble tags to reduce overall conjugate hydrophobicity, but achieved only modest improvements. As a result, the hydrophobic nature of cytotoxic payloads has remained a persistent obstacle in XDC development. Here, we report a fundamentally different chemical strategy that reframes this liability as a design opportunity. Rather than masking drug hydrophobicity, we exploit it as the driving force for self-assembly of facially amphiphilic protein-drug conjugates with programmable drug moieties (PDCs). In this architecture, the hydrophobic cytotoxic drug and the hydrophilic protein serve as the core and shell, respectively, spontaneously assembling into monodisperse, well-defined spherical protein nanotherapeutics of controlled size. This design principle transforms a longstanding physicochemical challenge into a functional engineering tool, enabling precise nanostructure formation without sacrificing potency. In vitro studies confirm that the resulting nanotherapeutics effectively kill cancer cells, establishing a strong foundation for further therapeutic development.