Ron Mathijssen

Ron Mathijssen has pioneered therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) for oral targeted cancer therapies, demonstrating that plasma drug level monitoring and dose adjustment for imatinib, sunitinib, and other TKIs significantly improves outcomes by ensuring adequate target coverage. His research established exposure-response relationships for multiple oral oncology drugs showing that patients with subtherapeutic drug levels have inferior outcomes that can be rescued by dose escalation. He showed that food-drug interactions, drug-drug interactions, and pharmacogenomic variability contribute to wide interpatient pharmacokinetic variability that TDM can address. His work has established TDM as a precision medicine tool for optimizing oral cancer therapy.