Background
toxicity
DRUG INTERACTIONS
Combinations of drugs are becoming increasingly common in oncology treatment. In some cases, patients can benefit from the interaction between two drugs, although there is usually a higher risk of developing toxicity. Due to drug–drug interactions, multidrug combinations often exhibit different toxicity profiles than those of single drugs, leading to a complex trial scenario. Numerous methods have been proposed for the design of phase I drug combination trials. For example, the two-dimensional Bayesian optimal interval design for combination drug (BOINcomb) is simple to implement and has desirable performance. However, in scenarios where the lowest and starting dose is close to being toxic, the BOINcomb design may tend to allocate more patients to overly toxic doses, and select an overly toxic dose combination as the maximum tolerated dose combination.