A digital health technology platform may prove useful for optimizing treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), according to research published in SLAS Technology.
The platform is based on phenotypic personalized medicine (PPM), in which a patient’s response to treatment can be visually represented in the shape of a parabola.
The graph plots the drug dose along the horizontal axis and the patient’s response on the vertical axis.
Researchers said PPM has the ability to accurately identify a person’s optimal drug and dose combinations throughout an entire course of treatment.
“Phenotypic personalized medicine is like turbocharged artificial intelligence,” said study author Dean Ho, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles.
“It personalizes combination therapy to optimize efficacy and safety. The ability for our technology to continuously pinpoint the proper dosages of multiple drugs from such a large pool of possible combinations overcomes a challenge that is substantially more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.”
In this study, Dr Ho and his colleagues used PPM to (retrospectively) individualize drug ratios/dosages in 2 pediatric patients with standard-risk ALL.
The researchers looked at the patients’ records to examine the administration of 4-drug maintenance regimens (dexamethasone, vincristine, mercaptopurine, and methotrexate).
The team said the drug doses served as the inputs, and maintaining absolute neutrophil counts and platelet counts within target ranges served as the outputs for optimization.
Using PPM, the researchers generated individualized 3-dimensional maps to determine the optimal drug ratios.
The team found their technology-suggested drug dosages were as much as 40% lower than clinical chemotherapy dosages, but they still maintained target neutrophil/platelet levels.
The parabolas showed that markedly different dosages of each drug were required to maintain normal cell counts for each patient.
The researchers said their results demonstrate a clear need to personalize ALL treatment and will serve as a foundation for a pending clinical trial to optimize multidrug chemotherapy.
“PPM has the ability to personalize combination therapy for a wide spectrum of diseases, making it a broadly applicable technology,” said study author Chih-Ming Ho, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles.
“The fact that we don’t need any information pertaining to a disease’s biological process in order to optimize and personalize treatment is a revolutionary advance. We’re at the interface of digital health and cancer treatment.”
The research team is planning to recruit patients for a prospective trial within the next year. The technology is approved for additional infectious disease and oncology studies.
