By Roxanne Khamsi

Antibody therapies have traditionally consisted of drugs that can deliver a strong blow to a single target, such as a cancer cell, with great specificity. But companies have made recent investments to improve these molecules by equipping them with multipronged attacks—developing so-called ‘multispecific’ antibodies that have two or more simultaneous targets.

“There’s definitely a trend of multispecific therapies,” says immunologist Gregory Adams of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. And that trend has reached big pharma.

In October of last year, for example, MacroGenics, a biotechnology firm in Rockville, Maryland, announced that it had received $60 million from the German drug company Boehringer Ingelheim as part of a collaboration to develop a platform for antibodies that can bind two different molecules at the same time. This follows from a $505 million deal four years ago made by New York’s Bristol-Myers Squibb to acquire Adnexus Therapeutics, a Waltham, Massachusetts–based biotech company developing multispecific biologics. And this summer, the Indiana–based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly announced a “multi-million dollar” investment to double its capacity in drugs that have multiple targets.

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