Metastatic Melanoma Treated Effectively with T Cell Therapy, Clinical Trial Shows

Source: Geneng News, December 2022

Results of the world’s first comparative phase III trial probing the efficacy of tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy in solid tumors, support the use of the therapy in patients with advanced metastatic melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer. The results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on December 8, 2022 “Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocyte Therapy or Ipilimumab in Advanced Melanoma.”

The trial was led by the Netherlands Cancer Institute in collaboration with the National Center for Cancer Immune Therapy in Copenhagen, and sponsored by the KWF Dutch Cancer Society, ZonMw, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, Stichting Avento, and other Danish organizations. Based on these results, the Dutch National Health Care Institute will assess the potential of TIL therapy as a standard treatment, so that it can be covered by basic health insurance.

“Ten years ago, melanoma was so deadly that I would be seeing an entirely new patient population every year. Now I’ve been seeing some patients for ten years. This is largely due to the discovery of immunotherapy, which has revolutionized treatment for melanomas. But we still find that about half of people diagnosed with metastatic melanoma lose their lives within five years, so we’re still not where we want to be—not by a long shot, said John Haanen, MD, medical oncologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, who led the TIL trial. “The TIL trial has shown that cell therapy using the patient’s own immune cells is an extremely powerful immunotherapy for metastatic melanoma, and that this therapy still offers a high chance of improvement, even if other immunotherapies fail.”
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