Therapeutic Drug Monitoring of Oral Oncology Drugs: Another Example of Maslow's Hammer

While therapeutic drug monitoring is a potentially attractive strategy that can be utilized by clinical pharmacologists to optimize drug dosing, the costs and risks must be balanced against the potential benefits. However, there is great uncertainty regarding the optimal population dose for most oncology drugs, given the lack of randomized dose-ranging phase II trials. Therefore, efforts to individualize dosing are for the most part premature for such agents.