Alexandre Chan, President Elect of The Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC), and Founding Chair and Professor of Clinical Pharmacy Practice at the UCI School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, shared a post by UC Irvine School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, adding:
“Excited to share our new study on the real-world safety of antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs).
ADCs have transformed cancer care, but their toxicity burden in routine practice is still underexplored. We analyzed 3,511 patients treated with the 10 most-used ADCs across six University of California medical centers over a decade.
A few key takeaways:
- Neutropenia risk varied widely by agent — grade 3+ neutropenia ranged from ~5% to ~94% depending on the ADC.
- ADCs used in hematologic malignancies carried higher rates of severe neutropenia, hospitalization, ICU admission, and death than those used in solid tumors.
- Breast cancer was the most common malignancy in our cohort (43%), and the two most-used breast cancer ADCs — trastuzumab deruxtecan and ado-trastuzumab emtansine — showed comparatively low rates of febrile and severe neutropenia.
As ADC use grows, these findings reinforce the need for ADC-specific risk assessment and proactive supportive care, including targeted G-CSF prophylaxis in higher-risk patients. They also make the case for continued research — real-world data, prospective studies, and machine learning — to better predict risk and mitigate ADC toxicities.
Grateful to my co-authors and everyone who made this work possible!”
Quoting UC Irvine School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences‘s post:
“A major real-world study by University of California, Irvine pharmacy researchers has found serious blood-related side effects associated with antibody-drug conjugates, an increasingly important class of targeted cancer therapies. Over the years, many novel ADC therapies have been approved for treating various types of cancers. Read the full story via the link below.”
Title: Incidence of Clinically Significant Neutropenia and Complications Related to Antibody-Drug Conjugates: A Real-World Study at the University of California
Authors: Tiffany Jan, Miranda Chen, Fan-Ying Chan, Nicole Kuderer, Alexandre Chan
Read the Full Article.
Other articles featuring Alexandre Chan.