Prevalence of drug-drug interactions in oncology patients enrolled on National Clinical Trials Network oncology clinical trials.

Background: Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) in subjects enrolling in clinical trials can impact not only safety of the patient but also study drug outcomes and data validity. This makes it critical to adequately screen and manage DDIs. The study objective was to determine the prevalence of DDIs involving study medications in subjects enrolling in National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) clinical trials at a single institution.

Comparison of Nine Tools for Screening Drug-Drug Interactions of Oral Oncolytics.

Purpose: Patients with cancer are an especially vulnerable population to potential drug-drug interactions (DDIs). This makes it important to adequately screen them for DDIs. The objective of this study was to compare the abilities of nine DDI screening tools to detect clinically relevant interactions with oral oncolytics.

Folate-Hapten-Mediated Immunotherapy Synergizes with Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor Receptor Inhibitors in Treating Murine Models of Cancer.

The overexpression of folate receptors (FR) on many human cancers has led to the development of folate-linked drugs for the imaging and therapy of FR-expressing cancers. In a recent phase I clinical trial of late-stage renal cell carcinoma patients, folate was exploited to deliver an immunogenic hapten, fluorescein, to FR tumor cells in an effort to render the cancer cells more immunogenic. Although >50% of the patients showed prolonged stable disease, all patients eventually progressed, suggesting that the folate-hapten immunotherapy was insufficient by itself to treat the cancer.

Prediction of Response to Therapy for Autoimmune/Inflammatory Diseases Using an Activated Macrophage-Targeted Radioimaging Agent.

The ability to select patients who will respond to therapy is especially acute for autoimmune/inflammatory diseases, where the costs of therapies can be high and the progressive damage associated with ineffective treatments can be irreversible. In this article we describe a clinical test that will rapidly predict the response of patients with an autoimmune/inflammatory disease to many commonly employed therapies. This test involves quantitative assessment of uptake of a folate receptor-targeted radioimaging agent ((99m)Tc-EC20) by a subset of inflammatory macrophages that accumulate at sites of inflammation.