Breaking the Therapeutic Drug Monitoring Logistics Barrier

Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM)2 is one of the most complex laboratory testing processes in modern laboratory medicine practice. Based on the simple en-gineering principle of feedback control, TDM strives to regulate an individual’s exposure to a drug by measur-ing the drug’s concentrations, usually at steady state and at distributional equilibrium, and then use these concentrations to determine the drug’s new dose. Un-like a thermostat in a home that can measure temper-ature in real time and trigger the introduction of more heat from a furnace until a target temperature is reached, drug concentration monitoring currently re-quires multiple steps, including administration of a drug at the correct dose, collection of one or more blood samples at precise times following drug admin