Commitment To Progress For Patients
- AbbVie’s oncology strategy is built on a deep understanding of tumor biology and target identification — finding what’s overexpressed on cancer cells and building medicines around that science.
- Temab-A, AbbVie’s next-generation antibody drug conjugate, has shown compelling activity across six tumor types: two forms of non-small cell lung cancer, colorectal, pancreatic, platinum-resistant ovarian, and head and neck cancers.
- AbbVie’s T-cell engager etentamig is bringing immunotherapy to multiple myeloma — designed for efficacy, but also for patient convenience, allowing treatment closer to home with longer intervals between visits.
- The future of cancer care, as AbbVie sees it, is fully individualized — matching every patient to the therapy best suited to their tumor biology, with the goal of moving beyond remission toward cure.
An oncologist by training who now oversees oncology development at AbbVie, Dr. Abidoye brings both the clinician’s instinct and the drug developer’s discipline to a company in the middle of a significant expansion — from its established footholds in hematology into a broader war on cancer across solid tumors.
Read MoreFollowing the Biology Across Multiple Cancers
One example of AbbVie’s approach is Temab-A (telisotuzumab adizutecan; ABBV-400), an investigational next-generation antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) directed against c-Met, a protein that is overexpressed in several cancers. Rather than limiting development to a single tumor type, AbbVie is evaluating Temab-A across multiple cancers where c-Met may play an important role. At ASCO, the company highlighted data in several tumor types, including non-small cell lung cancer, colorectal cancer, platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.Abidoye believes these therapies have the potential to improve both efficacy and tolerability compared with traditional chemotherapy. The goal is to deliver treatment more selectively than traditional chemotherapy while maintaining effectiveness and improving tolerability.
“Chemotherapy that previously had been the mainstay for treatment for a lot of patients,” he says, “could potentially become a thing of the past in some of these areas of high unmet need.”
Bringing Immunotherapy to Myeloma
In hematology, AbbVie is taking a proven playbook — it already has approved therapies in lymphoma and CLL — and pushing further. Its T-cell engager epcoritamab (Epkinly) has already brought new hope to patients with aggressive lymphoma. Now AbbVie is bringing similar technology to multiple myeloma with etentamig, designed not just for efficacy, but for convenience — allowing patients to be treated closer to home, with longer intervals between visits.
The Vision: A Therapy for Every Patient
Looking ahead, Abidoye’s excitement centers on something more fundamental than any single drug. He traces the arc of progress to put it in perspective: “We’ve come a long way from the point where patients had no treatment options available at all, to where patients had highly toxic therapies — some of which were worse than the actual disease — to now where we have multiple options that deliver highly efficacious therapies. But we’re not done.”
The destination, as he sees it, is full individualization — “a therapy that optimizes the patient and tumor characteristics to give the patient the best treatment, the longest longevity, and the best safety profile.” And beyond that, a word that was once unthinkable in oncology: cure. “That’s what motivates me, and I think that’s what motivates everybody at AbbVie.”
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