Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) 

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Description and clinical utility:
 Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) can be defined as the use of drug measurement in biological fluids as an aid to the management of patients receiving drug therapy for the alleviation or prevention of diseases. TDM in several centers remains within the confines of clinical biochemistry departments that provides only the measuring (assay only) and not the monitoring (assay and clinical interpretation) service.
 Clinician routinely monitor drug pharmacodynamics by directly measuring physiological indices of therapeutic response e.g. lipid concentration, blood glucose, blood pressure or clotting tests. For many drugs there is either no readily available measure of effect or it is insufficiently sensitive. Large interindividual variation in the relationship between dose and response can make individualizing drug dosage difficult, for example drugs with narrow therapeutic indices, large interindividual variation in pharmacokinetics, or concentration dependent pharmacokinetics. In other cases it is difficult to distinguish between the progress of the disease and the pharmacological effects of a drug. It is in these situations that TDM is an essential part of clinical management.
 TDM necessitates efficient, fast and reliable analytical methods validated by external quality control. In our work we will develop an HPLC based methods for measurements of plasma concentration of different groups of drugs, including antipsyhcotics, antiepileptics and anti-arrhythmics, with important and active metabolites.    

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