Drug kinetics and drug resistance in optimal chemotherapy.

A system of differential equations for the control of tumor cells growth in a cycle nonspecific chemotherapy is presented. First-order drug kinetics and drug resistance are taken into account in a class of optimal control problems. The results show that the strategy corresponding to the maximum rate of drug injection is optimal for the Malthusian model of cell growth (which is a relatively good model for the initial phase of tumor growth). For more general models of cell growth, this strategy proved to be suboptimal under certain conditions.