Colorectal cancer remains among the most prevalent gastrointestinal malignancies worldwide, imposing a substantial clinical burden and highlighting the urgent need for precision and personalized treatment strategies. Conventional drug delivery approaches are limited by low selectivity, restricted bioavailability, and systemic toxicity, thereby limiting therapeutic efficacy. Antibody–drug conjugates, as advanced delivery plat-forms, have the advantages of highly specific antibody recognition, versatile cytotoxic payloads, and continuously evolving linker technologies. This combination provides novel opportunities to increase efficacy, reduce toxicity, and enable individualized precision therapy. Recent advances have demonstrated the potential of ADCs in CRC, yet challenges such as resistance, toxicity, and clinical translation persist. Multidisciplinary efforts among the pharmaceutical industry and molecular biology and clinical medicine fields will be essential to accelerate the development of more precise and personalized CRC therapies. This review summarizes the current research progress on ADCs as a treatment option for CRC, discusses innovations in delivery system design, examines the key challenges of personalization, and highlights future directions to better integrate ADCs into effective treatment paradigms.

Liver metastasis is the leading cause of mortality in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, and there is an urgent need for biomarkers to improve the diagnosis and prognosis of CRC. However, the molecular mechanisms driving metastatic progression remain incompletely understood, necessitating the discovery of novel therapeutic targets. GEO datasets and machine learning algorithms (Lasso regression, SVM, and RF) were employed to screen for upregulated genes in CRC liver metastasis. Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks were constructed using STRING. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and ATAC-seq were performed to analyze immune infiltration and chromatin accessibility in metastatic tissues. Functional enrichment analysis of RNA-seq data was conducted to explore DAPK1-related pathways. Finally, CRISPR/Cas9-mediated knockout of DAPK1 in LoVo cells was used to validate its role in invasion and migration. In this study, we identified DAPK1 as a metastasis-specific upregulated gene in CRC. scRNA-seq of CRC metastases highlighted a significant correlation between DAPK1 expression and macrophage infiltration. Furthermore, ATAC-seq analysis demonstrated increased chromatin accessibility of DAPK1 in CRC liver metastasis. CRISPR/Cas9-mediated knockout of DAPK1 in LoVo cells markedly suppressed their invasion and migration. By combining machine learning and multi-omics bioinformatics approaches, we identified DAPK1 as a novel biomarker for CRC liver metastasis, which has potential implications for prognosis and therapeutic targeting. These findings highlight DAPK1 as a critical driver of metastatic progression and provide a theoretical foundation for the treatment of CRC.