| After this year’s congress in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, we all went home with some gems to put into practice at work – whether in the clinic, new research ideas or problem solving to better serve patients and clients. We also learned some things about each other: some members have famous children, others are really really great dancers.
This month we collected members’ responses to the question “What did you take home with you from the recent congress?”. If you would like to send a response, please Contact the Communications Committee.
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I learned that we are able to measure blood drug concentration by using “Dried blood spot” sample. Dried blood spot sample can be preserved for a long period and transported easily to other institutions (for example, medical research centre and so on). I expect that we will be able to conduct large-scale multicentre population pharmacokinetic analyses more easily by using this sampling method.
I learned that ganciclovir can cause neutropenia by activation to the triphosphate form even in patients who are not infected with CMV. I also learned that I should consider linezolid TDM. Finally, I learned that continuous infusion vancomycin could be a good option for outpatients.
Although my personal research interests are in the field of immunosuppression, the largest numbers of requests I have to deal with in our lab are related to drugs of abuse. Therefore, the pre-congress symposium with its broad spectrum of topics by very experienced speakers served as a very helpful update. In addition, I really enjoyed a lot of excellent talks as well as the opportunity for scientific exchange about trends and challenges of TDM of antibiotics – an area that expands rapidly in our hospital nowadays. Furthermore, I was happy to learn more about the new developments of TDM in oncology.
As one of the local organizers of the Rotterdam meeting I may be somewhat biased, but I think it was a great meeting. There were so many attendees, and we had so much to offer. I could feel the enthusiasm and energy. There is a bright future for our society, as in more and more areas of clinical care the added value of our expertise is becoming evident. I went home with a big YES WE CAN!!
In a presentation by Bastiaan Venhuis I learnt about New psychoactive substances in food supplements that can give false positives for amphetamines. In particular beta-methyl-amphetamines in supplements such as dexeprine and Jacked powder, which are difficult to separate from alpha ones. This helped to explain some of the false positive results experienced by a Norwegian customer and enabled us to recommend the appropriate reference materials for identification.
I learned that I should consider doing TDM for (val)ganciclovir more often and perform renal replacement therapy for severe metformin intoxications less frequently.
I learned many scientific facts about what is new in paracetamol/acetaminophen overdose treatment, the use of new biomarkers in monitoring transplant patients, and how rapidly the use of anti-microbial drug TDM is expanding. However, most of all I learned that the best part of IATDMCT continues to be that it offers members the opportunity to interact, even if often too briefly, with so many wonderful people from around the world (including our Dutch hosts who did such a great job of running the meeting and others who can dance really well).
I learned that an optimal dosage of vancomycin for preterm neonates is similar after continuous intravenous infusion and 1-hour infusion despite data obtained from two different continents. Moreover, it was very interesting to listen about promising results of graft-derived circulating cell-free DNA for personalizing immunosuppression treatment while new results are being gathered from proteomic analyses in transplantation in multi-centre studies. The consensus document presented on different aspects of everolimus TDM was really informative.
I came back to Limoges thinking that pharmacogenetics is really on a good track, and that we should now concentrate on implementation tools (pharmacogenetics-based therapeutic recommendations, integration of the recommendations into computerized systems for drug prescription and automated medication surveillance, etc.). The Dutch Pharmacogenetics Working Group is doing a great job with that!
What did I take home with me from the recent congress? A lot of new knowledge on pharmacokinetics and TDM of all kinds of drugs, such as that the absorption of posaconazole is much more reliable after oral intake of the tablets than after the suspension. Furthermore, some very interesting data were presented on mechanistic modelling of the susceptibility of bacteria to antibiotics.
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