Towards an optimal drug-delivery regimen for methotrexate chemotherapy

摘要

To date, drug regimes for cancer chemotherapy have been developed on empirical bases. In this work the desired distribution of a certain drug, methotrexate, is specified a priori. Then a drug regimen is developed which most nearly attains this distribution. The regimen is designed to attain certain quantitative therapeutic measures (i.e. maximum tumor-cell damage with minimum normal-cell damage). Although the procedure is a general one, we have chosen the drug methotrexate to illustrate the principles.