Melanoma is a lethal form of skin cancer. Despite recent breakthroughs of BRAF-V600E and PD-1 inhibitors showing remarkable clinical responses, melanoma can eventually survive these targeted therapies and become resistant. To solve the drug resistance issue, we designed and synthesized ligand-drug conjugates that couple cytotoxic drugs, which have a low cancer resistance issue, with the melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) agonist melanotan-II (MT-II), which provides specificity to MC1R-overexpressing...