Successful afatinib treatment of advanced non-small-cell lung cancer patients undergoing hemodialysis.

The treatment for patients with lung cancer undergoing hemodialysis, who are frequently elderly and have poor performance status, becomes a more important subject. However, the feasibility of afatinib in patients with chronic renal failure undergoing hemodialysis has not, so far, been reported. Here, afatinib was administered to three patients with NSCLC harboring EGFR mutation and chronic renal failure undergoing hemodialysis. Pharmacokinetic (PK) data of afatinib supported the safety of afatinib treatment. After receiving their written informed consent from all patients, they were administered 30 mg afatinib daily with HD three times a week. We performed PK analyses of afatinib on days 1, 2, 10, and 11 after initial administration of afatinib. All three patients exhibited a partial response without any serious adverse events during the administration of afatinib. These PK data were similar to those of patients with normal organ function, which were previously reported. Our findings may be particularly useful given the current opportunity to use afatinib as a first-line treatment for EGFR-mutated NSCLC patients, providing an additional option for patients with impaired renal function.

Simultaneous and rapid determination of gefitinib, erlotinib and afatinib plasma levels using liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.

A simultaneous, selective, sensitive and rapid liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry method was developed and validated for the quantification of gefitinib, erlotinib and afatinib in 250 µL samples of human blood plasma. Diluted plasma samples were extracted using a liquid-phase extraction procedure with tert-butyl methyl ether. The three drugs were separated by high-performance liquid chromatography using a C18 column and an isocratic mobile phase running at a flow rate of 0.2 mL/min for 5 min. The drugs were detected using a tandem mass spectrometer with electrospray ionization using imatinib as an internal standard. Calibration curves were generated over the linear concentration range of 0.05-100 nm in plasma with a lower limit of quantification of 0.01 or 0.05 nm for all compounds. Finally, the validated method was applied to a clinical pharmacokinetic study in patients with nonsmall-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) following the oral administration of afatinib. These results indicate that this method is suitable for assessing the risks and benefits of chemotherapy in patients with NSCLC and is useful for therapeutic drug monitoring for NSCLC treatment. As far as we know, this is the first report on LC-MS/MS method for the simultaneous quantification of NSCLC tyrosine kinase inhibitor plasma concentrations including afatinib. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.