Adaptive therapy (AT) protocols have been introduced to combat drug-resistance in cancer, and are characterized by breaks in maximum tolerated dose treatment (the current standard of care in most clinical settings). These breaks are scheduled to maintain tolerably high levels of tumor burden, employing competitive suppression of treatment-resistant sub-populations by treatment-sensitive sub-populations. AT has been integrated into several ongoing or planned clinical trials, including treatment of metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, and BRAF-mutant melanoma, with initial clinical results suggesting that it can offer significant extensions in the time to progression over the standard of care.

However, these clinical protocols may be sub-optimal, as they fail to account for variation in tumor dynamics between patients, and result in significant heterogeneity in patient outcomes. Mathematical modeling and analysis have been proposed to optimize adaptive protocols, but they do not account for clinical restrictions, most notably the discrete time intervals between the clinical appointments where a patient’s tumor burden is measured and their treatment schedule is re-evaluated. We present a general framework for deriving optimal treatment protocols which account for these discrete time intervals, and derive optimal schedules for a number of models to avoid model-specific personalization. We identify a trade-off between the frequency of patient monitoring and the time to progression attainable, and propose an AT protocol based on a single treatment threshold. Finally, we identify a subset of patients with qualitatively different dynamics that instead require a novel AT protocol based on a threshold that changes over the course of treatment.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

K.G. acknowledges funding from the EPSRC CDT in Sustainable Approaches to Biomedical Science: Responsible and Reproducible Research - SABS:R3 (EP/S024093/1). A.R.A gratefully acknowledges funding by the NCI via the Cancer Systems Biology Consortium (CSBC) U54CA274507 and support from the Moffitt Center of Excellence for Evolutionary Therapy. All other authors have no funding to declare.

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↵§ Theory Division, Cleveland Clinic, Ohio

↵¶ Joint Senior Author