The future of compounded chemotherapy in veterinary medicine

In an interview with dvm360, Philip Bergman, DVM, MS, PhD, DACVIM, talked about a shift in veterinary oncology that began about a decade ago, when oncologists began noticing that patients receiving the compounded therapy CCNU (lomustine), did not experience the usual adverse effects associated with its FDA-approved counterpart. In this interview, recorded during the Fetch dvm360 conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Bergman shared that his lecture “Compounding Pharmacies for Chemotherapy Agents,” presented at the conference, delved into this topic, including the research and findings on the cause of this, as well as the superior precision of doses of 503B types of compounders (503B outsourcing facilities).

Below is the interview transcript

Philip Bergman, DVM, MS, PhD, DACVIM: I got very interested in this space about 10 or 15 years ago, when as oncologists, we started noticing that patients that were given compounded CCNU, or a type of chemotherapy, were not having the typical side effects that we tend to see when you use the FDA-approved product. So subsequently, some very interesting studies came out that showed that the amount of drug that was actually being delivered to you from certain compounding pharmacies was a lot less than we thought it was, which then impacts the outcomes for our patients. So, in the lecture, I summarize all of that literature.

There's a publication that my team just came out with a couple months ago in veterinary comparative oncology, and it basically shows, if you put everything together, that 503B types of compounders, which are called “outsourcing facilities,” which are fairly rare in veterinary medicine, they tend to do a much, much better job with the precision of the dose that we're asking to be delivered, actually physically gets delivered to us.