ESMO 2026: ADC Developments Across Solid Tumors—Emerging Efficacy, Treatment Sequencing, and Patient Selection

Antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) are moving from late-line salvage therapy into first-line combinations, maintenance strategies, and planned treatment sequences. Abstracts presented at the ESMO Congress 2026 in Madrid describe how clinicians currently choose among ADCs, how much activity is lost when one ADC follows another, and whether functional testing can add to conventional biomarkers. Read alongside recent work on resistance biology and new ADC formats, these studies point to one practical conclusion: ADC choice increasingly depends on what kind of therapy the patient has already received, not only on the antigen the tumor expresses.