We have entered a stage where there are plentiful of therapeutic agents either in clinical use or in development for clinical use. The difficulty is not in finding drugs for treatment, but to tailor fit treatment to the patients- personalized medicine. Personalized medicine demands both pharmacokinetic (PK) profiling and predictive/prognostic biomarker (PD) profiling. While there is a great deal of progress being made in PD profiling, PK profiling has only seen fractional gain. The goal of this project is to develop a rapid test platform to allow for the determination of PK profile in the field. Lateral flow was chosen as it is both rapid and relatively inexpensive for field deployment. The availability of such a technology would change medical practice the way it is now so that fully personalized medicine can become a reality- where correct therapy can be dosed at effective dose for each and every patient. The overall strategy is to convert the currently wholly owned ELISA method for quantitation by String to lateral flow format for field deployment. Abraxane- the most advance paclitaxel formulation- will be the target of this research due to its widespread use as chemotherapy and linear pharmacokinetic and available predictive/prognostic biomarker (SPARC).
