Dried Blood Spot Technique Applied in Therapeutic Drug Monitoring of Anticancer Drugs: a Review on Conversion Methods to Correlate Plasma and Dried Blood Spot Concentrations

Anticancer drugs are notoriously characterized by a low therapeutic index, the introduction of drug monitoring (TDM) in oncologic clinical practice could therefore be fundamental to improve treatment efficacy. In this context, an attractive technique overcome conventional venous sampling limits and simplify TDM application is represented dried blood spot (DBS). Despite significant progress made bioanalysis exploiting DBS, there still need tackle some challenges that limit technology: one main issues comparison concentrations obtained from DBS with those reference matrix (e.g., plasma). fact, use assays estimate plasma highly dependent on chemical-physical characteristics measured analyte, particular how these properties determine partition whole blood. present review, we introduce critical investigation DBS-to-plasma concentration conversion methods proposed last ten years applied quantitative anticancer matrix. To prove concordance between concentration, results statistical tests presence or absence trends biases were also considered.