The ADC market has entered its second act — and the sequel looks nothing like the original. Enhertu and Padcev have proven the model works at blockbuster scale. The question now is different: who owns the next wave of innovation, and where is the white space?

HOUSTON tracks 229 companies operating across the ADC ecosystem — from therapeutic developers pushing novel targets and dual-payload architectures into the clinic, to the platform companies engineering next-generation linkers and conditional activation systems, to the CDMOs scaling conjugation manufacturing for an industry that can’t build capacity fast enough.

In just four months (December 2025 – April 2026), the ADC space generated $2.73 billion in licensing deal value across three major transactions. Three acquisitions closed. Thirteen companies hit major clinical milestones — most of them in next-generation formats like bispecific ADCs, dual-payload ADCs, and conditionally activated conjugates.