Pharmacometrics and systems biology in oncology: is there an intersection?

Oncology involves a therapeutic area with complex and individual disease states and disease progression and there is a limited number of anticancer drugs available. The drugs are usually administered in empirical complex dosing regimens which result in highly variable success rates. The following two approaches to achieve a more streamlined and rational drug development and drug treatment seem appealing: 1. More sophisticated understanding of the patient’s health/disease state and disease progression (“system”). 2. Development of new drugs with defined and tailored treatment regimens. The fundamental challenge of anticancer drug treatment is to effectively eliminate cancer cells in an individual patient using a treatment protocol with dosing regimens that are tolerated. Most classical cytotoxic anticancer agents do not distinguish between healthy and cancer cells and thus inhibit essential functions in both healthy and malignant cell populations. A new generation of anticancer drugs has been designed to interfere with specific molecular targets identified as playing a critical role in tumor growth and progression. In both cases, elucidation of the mechanisms and pathways at the molecular, cellular, tissue, organ and organism level is crucial. There is an urgent need for markers that indicate success, failure or toxicity prior to or at an early stage of the anticancer treatment (“biomarkers”).