By Kolin Hribar, PhD — Founder & CEO, Cypre

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Cypre attended AACR 2026 last month in San Diego. The premier event for cancer research drug discovery, preclinical and early clinical drew 20,000+ attendees marathon walking through the convention center, sprinting up escalators to watch the symposiums, and networking at exhibitor booths, posters, and post-event parties.

Next-generation drug modalities like bispecific antibodies, ADCs, and in vivo cell therapies continued to show promise for differentiated mechanisms, reduced toxicity, and enhanced efficacy. And as a follow up to AACR 2025, we witnessed the blended approach of bispecific ADCs, where a dual target mechanism couples with a warhead to trigger a localized response.

The ADC and bispecific posters in particular showed how fast these modalities are consolidating, with continued innovation around conditional activity and tumor microenvironment specificity. The upcoming pharma patent cliff over the next 3-5 years represents a unique time to drive critical innovation to the clinic, and biopharma has already started to buttress pipelines with these modalities.

Assessing these novel mechanisms depends on the translational tools available in the preclinical and early clinical phases. In the last several years, New Approach Methodologies (NAMs), including organoids, tissue slices, organ on chip, and AI approaches have become meaningful contributors in the Go/No Go datasets for advancing preclinical pipelines, supporting the workhorses of PDX, CDX, and syngeneic models in efficacy determination and GLP tox work including NHP models.

Interestingly, with the FDA’s 2025 guidelines for reducing animal testing and other regulatory agencies following suit, it appears that the industry is finally taking measured steps toward broader adoption. One pharma noted the shift will take place gradually, particularly for tox studies, where a mistake in safety can be fatal for patients. Efficacy studies appear to be moving faster toward broad scale adoption. Ultimately, as NAMs expand, their biological complexity, standardization of analytics, and automation enablement become critical.

The race is on, in multiple respects. To the patient’s advantage.