In a 2021 review, Jessica Kemp and Young Jik Kwon of the University of California Irvine in the US wrote that ‘The strategy against cancer needs to shift from finding new therapies to improving existing ones… in innovative, effective, and plausible ways.’ This proposal hints at an alternative approach to that of companion diagnostics: improving the specificity, not of drug action, but of drug delivery. If a drug can be delivered to tumour cells and to those only, then even one of the old-fashioned cell poisons that targets all rapidly dividing cells can become a safe, specific drug. And one way of doing this is to hitch the drug to its own miniature chemical delivery system.
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