Multispecific drugs herald a new era of biopharmaceutical innovation

The modern biopharmaceutical industry traces its roots to the dawn of the twentieth century, coincident with marketing of aspirin—a signature event in the history of modern drug development. Although the archetypal discovery process did not change markedly in the first seven decades of the industry, the past fifty years have seen two successive waves of transformative innovation in the development of drug molecules: the rise of ‘rational drug discovery’ methodology in the 1970s, followed by the invention of recombinant protein-based therapeutic agents in the 1980s. An incipient fourth wave is the advent of multispecific drugs. The successful development of prospectively designed multispecific drugs has the potential to reconfigure our ideas of how target-based therapeutic molecules can work, and what it is possible to achieve with them. Here I review the two major classes of multispecific drugs: those that enrich a therapeutic agent at a particular site of action and those that link a therapeutic target to a biological effector. The latter class—being freed from the constraint of having to directly modulate the target upon binding—may enable access to components of the proteome that currently cannot be targeted by drugs. The development and future prospects of prospectively designed multispecific drugs, which have the potential to transform the biopharmaceutical industry by enabling the targeting of currently inaccessible components of the proteome, are reviewed.