Curriculum Vitae

Optimising dosing strategy of paclitaxel in NSCLC

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for approximately 85% of all lung cancer cases. Paclitaxel, a taxane derived chemotherapeutic agent, in combination with platinum containing drugs (e.g. cisplatin or carboplatin) have been routinely used as a first-line treatment in patients with advanced NSCLC. Nevertheless, successful treatment is often hindered by dose-limiting toxicities such as neutropaenia and neurotoxicity. Therefore, it is important to have tolerable paclitaxel concentrations that do not hinder treatment efficacy and at the same time maintain a tolerable toxicity profile.

To achieve this, the timely prediction of treatment outcome (e.g. tumour response to treatment, overall survival,… ) is needed. Therefore, time course pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamics models of prognostic treatment markers (i.e. biomarkers) will be developed and relevant metrics that best predict treatment response will be evaluated. These efficacy models will then be combined with other toxicity models of neurotoxicity and haematotoxicity to evaluate the clinical utility of paclitaxel-based treatment. This joint description of the risk of toxicity and efficacy will help identify more ideal dosing schedules that can minimise incidence and severity of relevant toxicities and simultaneously retain clinical efficacy.

I hope that with this work, the timely identification/prediction of disease progression/regression would consequently prompt favourable interventions to avoid unnecessary side effects or ineffective treatment and that evaluating the risk of dose-limiting, treatment-related toxicities in relation to treatment efficacy would eventually identify safe and effective dosing schedules.