“There can be greater than a 10-fold difference in the concentration of anticancer drugs in the bloodstream of individual patients even when equal doses are being administered based on prevailing dosing methods. Personalized Chemotherapy Management (PCM®) will help oncologists target the optimal therapeutic range of such drugs and improve the lives of cancer patients. We don’t make chemotherapy drugs; we just make them work better.”
Salvatore J. Salamone, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
The current standard of care for chemotherapy dosing is based on body surface area (BSA) which provides a “one size fits all” approach to determining drug dose. Scientific advances in the treatment of cancer and other diseases are enabling a new era in medicine aimed at more precise, individually “customized” care. Targeting drug selection by pharmacogenomics and other new technologies helps identify which drug will be most effective in battling the disease. Numerous studies, however, have shown that other factors may affect the metabolism of drugs leading to large variations in their effective blood levels. These factors can often result in systemic drug concentrations far above or below the optimal therapeutic range.
Clinical trials have demonstrated that optimizing the drug dose based on the patient’s specific blood level can help overcome this variability and in doing so enhance the effectiveness of chemotherapy while improving the quality of the patient’s life during and after treatment through reduced toxicity.
Until now, measuring chemotherapy blood levels relied on time-consuming and expensive technologies involving sophisticated instrumentation and highly trained personnel. For this reason, such technologies have only been used for research purposes through specialized laboratories with access to this costly equipment and have not been amenable to widespread utilization.