Antifungal Drug Therapeutic Monitoring: What are the Issues?

Abstract

Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM), an established practice for many antimicrobials, has recently seen increasing utilization in the management of patients receiving antifungal agents. There is a growing body of literature supporting the use of TDM for itraconazole, voriconazole, posaconazole, and flucytosine. In addition, clinical practice guidelines have been recently published that give recommendations on the appropriate use of TDM for antifungal agents. However, there are still uncertainties regarding the optimal use of antifungal TDM in clinical practice. We conducted a review of recent literature in order to describe the clinical situations and specific antifungal agents for which TDM is ideal and summarize key information about the pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, drug toxicities, TDM concentration targets, and dose adjustment algorithms for antifungals in which routine TDM is performed.