In an antibody-drug conjugate, the linker is the safety valve - it must hold the toxin in circulation and release it only inside the target cell. US12187810B2 - "Glycoside dual-cleavage linkers for antibody-drug conjugates," issued January 7, 2025 to R.P. Scherer Technologies, LLC - claims a linker that demands two triggers before it lets go.
The load-bearing limitation is dual cleavage. A conventional cleavable linker releases its payload on a single trigger - a particular enzyme or pH. The claimed glycoside dual-cleavage linker requires two separate cleavage events to free the cytotoxic payload, narrowing release to conditions where both triggers are present and reducing premature, off-tumor payload release.
The CPC profile is linker-and-payload chemistry throughout: C07K 5/06034 (the peptide/glycoside linker), A61K 47/68031 and A61K 47/68033 (cytotoxic-payload conjugate chemistry), A61K 47/6813 / 47/6817 / 47/6829 (linker-payload classes), A61P 35/00 (antineoplastic). Notably absent from the distinguishing tags is any specific antibody - because the invention is the linker, agnostic to which antibody carries it.
Why does the linker carry the whole claim? Because, as the ADC field has long shown, the antibody and the payload are often known; the differentiating, patentable contribution is the release chemistry. A dual-cleavage design is a specific, claimable advance in that chemistry. A competitor's single-trigger linker, or a different dual-trigger design, may fall outside a claim drawn to this glycoside dual-cleavage mechanism.
For the landscape, linker chemistry is the most actively patented layer of the ADC estate precisely because it is where the therapeutic-window improvements live. Freedom-to-operate for an ADC program turns heavily on clearing the linker claims - and dual-cleavage and conditional-release designs like this one are the 2025 frontier of that layer.