Explore our comprehensive approach to cancer research
At Bristol Myers Squibb, we are driven by our passion to improve lives, with one of the most promising pipelines in the industry. Our cancer research approach stems from our deep understanding of disease biology and our belief in the importance of causal human biology. Expertise at the disease and molecular levels, coupled with insights from our industry-leading clinical and translational datasets, fuel the next wave of discovery and pipeline advances to bring meaningful new treatment options to patients. Explore our precision approach to cancer research below, and for more about our differentiated research platforms, visit our Protein Degradation and Cell Therapy hub pages.
Our cancer research strategy leverages molecular and clinical expertise and a deep understanding of causal human biology to guide scientific discovery and bring forward new, meaningful medicines for patients.
Pursuing cancer targets with the greatest potential
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Tap an image to explore - With a leading understanding of cancer cell biology, we are developing therapies that leverage novel tumor dependencies across hematology and oncology to design new ways to affect pathways crucial to cancer survival.
- Tumor intrinsic mechanisms include oncogenic drivers, lineage-specific targets and cancer cell vulnerabilities.
- Example tumor intrinsic targets: androgen receptor, mutant KRAS alleles, BCL6
- Deep expertise in the biology of the tumor microenvironment (TME) and immune system are being applied to develop new therapies that affect cancer’s environment and ability to survive.
- Tumor extrinsic mechanisms include next-generation Immuno-Oncology (I-O) targets, therapies leveraging immune cells (e.g., T regulatory and myeloid cells) and therapies that target aberrant stromal biology.
- Example tumor extrinsic targets: CCR8, CD19 and GPRC5D (cell therapy targeting)
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Tap an image to explore Enabled by a deep bench of modalities that can be matched to a molecular mechanism of action
- Immunotherapies modulate the body’s immune system so that it can better recognize and attack cancer.
- Immune cell engagers (ICEs) redirect the body’s immune response toward cancer cells.
- Targeted protein degraders harness the cell’s own machinery to degrade therapeutically relevant proteins that were often considered "undruggable."
- Cell therapies are medicines comprised of cells that are selected or engineered to treat disease. CAR T cell therapy involves reprograming immune cells to attack malignant cells.
- Targeted therapies address specific cancer gene mutations, deletions or other cancer specific characteristics of the cell.
- Small molecule modulators are molecules that are relatively small in size that bind to specific ‘pockets’ of target proteins important to cancer cells and perturb their function.
- Antibody-Drug Conjugates (ADCs) are therapeutics engineered to precisely deliver small molecule payloads to targeted locations using biologic monoclonal antibodies as honing mechanisms, offering improved efficacy and patient response with fewer off-target side effects.
- Radiopharmaceuticals (RPTs) deliver radioisotopes in a highly targeted way directly to tumors. The radioisotopes can be used as a diagnostic or theranostic tool and to precisely kill cancer cells.