World Journal of
Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences

A REVIEW ON METRONOMIC CHEMOTHERAPY

S. D. Labhade* and J. S. Jagtap

ABSTRACT

The introduction of the ?Maximum Tolerable Dose? (MTD) in normal treatment protocols (and its concurrent over toxicity) made vital the burden of rest periods between cycles of treatment—a training that includes re-development of tumor cells, yet in addition development of chose clones impervious to the treatment. So as to avoid the problems caused by traditional chemotherapeutic regimens, a new modality of drug administration called ?metronomic chemotherapy? has been proposed. It refers to the chronic, equally spaced administration of (generally) low doses of various chemotherapeutic drugs without extended rest periods. The curiosity of this treatment methodology lies not just in its anti- tumor efficacy with exceptionally low adverse effect, yet additionally in a cell target switch. With plenty of experimental work, beginning with the pioneering work in the Folkman and Kerbel labs, Metronomic chemotherapy (MCT) has built its foundations. Browder and colleagues demonstrated that standard chemotherapeutic drugs such as cyclophosphamide can also be used as anti-angiogenic agents. The administration of cyclophosphamide in doses lower than the MTD, at shorter intervals and without extended rest periods, showed results better than those obtained with the MTD schedule in the treatment of two cyclophosphamide-resistant tumours, Lewis lung carcinoma and the murine mammary carcinoma cell line EMT-6.

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