Development of a national therapeutic drug monitoring programme in childhood cancer in the UK
Children are not just small adults. Therefore, dosing chemotherapeutics in childhood patients, particularly infants and neonates, can be challenging as a result of developmental and physiological changes that occur during the first weeks and months of life. These changes can affect how the drug is distributed and removed from the body, making it difficult to predict drug exposure in young patients and determine the most appropriate dosing regimens to use.
Our expert leads a national therapeutic drug monitoring service for the measurement of chemotherapeutics in challenging childhood cancer patients. The talk will focus on how this service is run and how they measure drugs in patient samples and the impact this has had on individual patients and on national treatment guidelines. The remainder of the talk will focus on the investigation of novel sampling approaches and analytical techniques that our expert and their team are working on to facilitate a higher throughput of patient sample analysis to support a larger infrastructure of TDM.
What will you learn?
- How TDM is used in the UK
- Differences in PK between infants and older children
- Impact and benefit of TDM for challenging patients
- Bioanalytical techniques used to measure chemotherapeutics in pediatric patients
Who may this interest?
- Bioanalysts
- Clinical Pharmacologists
- Translational Researchers
- Clinical Trial Coordinators
Speaker
Shelby Barnett
Research Associate
Newcastle University (Newcastle, UK)
Shelby obtained her PhD from the University of Manchester (Manchester, UK), where she investigated the utility of endogenous biomarkers to predict drug-drug interactions in the liver. The main focus of her research has always been on the translational aspect of pharmacokinetics.
She is currently a Research Associate at the Newcastle University Centre for Cancer (Newcastle, UK). Currently, her main research focus is improving the dosing of anticancer drugs in challenging pediatric patient populations, such as neonates and infants. As part of this research, she leads a therapeutic drug monitoring program of work that supports the dosing of hard-to-treat childhood cancer patients in the UK.
In association with
