Over a Decade of Experience with Carboplatin Therapeutic Drug Monitoring in a Childhood Cancer Setting in the United Kingdom

The widely used platinum agent carboplatin represents a good example of an anticancer drug where clear relationships between pharmacological exposure and clinical response and toxicity have previously been shown. Within the setting of childhood cancer, there are defined groups of patients who present a particular challenge when dosing with carboplatin, including neonates and infants, those who are anephric, and poor prognosis patients receiving high-dose chemotherapy. For these groups, nonstandard chemotherapy dosing regimens are currently utilised, often with different approaches between clinical study protocols and between treatment centres. For the treatment of these patient populations in the UK, there is now significant experience in carrying out therapeutic drug monitoring, aiming to consistently achieve target drug exposures, maximise drug efficacy and minimise treatment-related side effects. An ongoing clinical trial is currently providing information on drug exposure for a wide range of anticancer agents in these hard to treat patient populations. In addition to supporting dosing decisions for individual patients, the collection and analysis of these data may allow the development of future dosing regimens. For example, current reduced dosing approaches for neonates and infants based on age or body weight, may well be better replaced by regimens based on a sound pharmacological rationale. The successful use of adaptive carboplatin dosing in childhood cancer should encourage the development of therapeutic drug monitoring approaches more widely in an oncology setting.