Therapeutic Drug Monitoring
Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) aims for personalized patient care where drug dosage is individually adjusted in order to optimize the treatment outcome of any disease.
There has been a great dynamic around TDM related to DBS for the last 5 years. Personalized health care is a big topic in the pharma industry and DBS is a well-suited technique to monitor a patient’s drug uptake (ADME studies). Drugs that are required to be taken long term are especially appropriate. Enabling an “at home” sampling for patients would bring significant cost reductions and comfort for the patients [1]. The implementation of DBS-analysis avoids the requirement that patients need to visit the hospital several times to draw up to 5 mL of blood for plasma testing. With DBS, patients can draw samples by themselves at home and send them via standard mail to a centralized laboratory. Also, the correct administration of drugs can be monitored very easily by DBS [2]. Therefore, there is a clear trend of using DBS for monitoring anti-cancer drugs, antiretroviral drugs, antiepileptic drugs, immunosuppressive drugs, etc.
[1] A. J. Wilhelm, J. C. G. den Burger, and E. L. Swart, “Therapeutic Drug Monitoring by Dried Blood Spot: Progress to Date and Future Directions,” Clin. Pharmacokinet., vol. 53, no. 11, pp. 961–973, 2014.
[2] M. H. U. Duthaler, B. Berger, S. Erb, M. Battegay, E. Letang, S. Gaugler, S. Krähenbühl, “Automated high throughput analysis of antiretroviral drugs in dried blood spots.,” J Mass Spectrom., vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 534–542, 2017.