Optimizing Drug Schedule for Cell-Cycle Specific Cancer Chemotherapy

This article presents optimization of drug schedule for cycle-specific chemotherapy by multi-objective evolutionary algorithm NSGA-II. The possible response of tumor and normal cells under the influence of cycle-specific drugs is formulated as an optimal control problem. The objective is to minimize the tumor burden, with minimum harm to the patient’s health. Elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II optimizes the drug schedule under constrained toxicity and drug concentration. Results provide multiple solutions to oncologists to choose the drug regimen according to patient’s physiology. Comparative analysis of optimized drug schedules with previous work for cycle-specific chemotherapy is also presented. NSGA-II optimized drug schedule shows promising results in effectively solving the conflicting multi-objective constrained problem of chemotherapy drug scheduling.