Start with the scale: antibody-drug conjugate filings in 2023 weren't a trickle, they were a flood — thousands of related records touching one technology. That volume alone marks a category shift.
An ADC has three engineered parts: the targeting antibody, the toxic payload, and the linker that joins them. A surge in filings across all three is more telling than a spike in one, because it means companies are competing on the whole system, not one piece.
The target layer is crowded. Pierre Fabre's US11661457B2 stakes out an IGF-1R-targeted conjugate; Seagen's US11617798B2 covers anti-CD228 antibodies and their conjugates. Different tumor markers, same architecture.
Tellingly, the filings also reach into measurement and quality. Konica Minolta's US11662348B2 covers a method for detecting the constituent components of an ADC. When companies start patenting how to analyze a drug class, that class has industrialized — the filings move beyond the molecule into manufacturing and QC.
The usual caveat holds doubly here: thousands of filings is a measure of activity and competition, not of approvals. Most ADC programs will fail in the clinic. Filing volume tells you the field got crowded and serious, not that the pipeline will pay off.
By the numbers, 2023 is when ADCs stopped being a specialty bet and became a mainstream oncology battleground — and the spread of filings across targets, payloads, linkers, and analytics is the fingerprint of that transition.