OnCo
ideasIdea

Real-world dose intensity and toxicity monitoring to revise labelled doses

Track how much of each cancer drug patients actually receive and how often they need to reduce it, and use that to change the official dose when the label is too high.

Many oncology drugs are labelled at doses most patients cannot tolerate; dose reductions in practice are common but invisible to regulators. Project Optimus addresses dose selection before approval; nothing systematic addresses it after. The proposal uses structured prescribing data to publish real-world dose intensity, reduction rates and toxicity per drug annually, with a regulatory pathway to update labels when the real-world modal dose differs from the label.

Hypothesis
Systematic real-world dose monitoring will identify at least ten approved oncology drugs where more than half of patients are dose-reduced, and label revision or randomised dose-optimisation trials will follow for a majority of them.
Rationale
Post-marketing dose changes (for example for several kinase inhibitors and ADCs) have happened only after years of ad hoc reports; structured data would surface the problem in months.
What would test it
Compute dose-intensity metrics for the 30 most-used oral targeted agents in one national prescribing dataset; publish; track subsequent label or guideline changes over three years.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
regulator
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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