Half-life
The time it takes for the amount of a drug in the blood to fall by half. It determines how often a drug must be given: hours for many chemotherapies, weeks for antibodies.
Small molecules are typically cleared by the liver and kidneys within hours to a day, so kinase inhibitors are taken daily; antibodies are protected from breakdown by recycling receptors and persist for two to four weeks, allowing dosing every three or six weeks. Half-life shapes both benefit and harm: a long-lived checkpoint inhibitor keeps working, and keeps causing immune side effects, for months after the last dose, while a radioactive drug's physical half-life (6.6 days for lutetium-177, 10 days for actinium-225) determines how long it irradiates the tumour. Pharmacokinetics is the study of these processes, and matching dose and schedule to them is central to dose optimisation.
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