DPD is also responsible for the degradation of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), which is the most frequently prescribed anticancer drug for the treatment of malignancies of the gastrointestinal tract.
These findings suggest that DPYD-guided fluoropyrimidines treatment represent a cost-saving choice for individuals suffering from cancer in the Italian healthcare setting.
Although normal activity of DPD was observed in fibroblasts, the DPD activity in leucocytes of the cancer patient proved to be in the heterozygous range.
These 10 exons were sequenced in a cohort of cancer patients with reduced (n = 23) or normal (n = 14) DPD activity to determine the contribution of each variant allele to low DPD activity in vivo.