Triple combination cancer immunotherapy improves outcomes in preclinical melanoma model

Source: The Pharma Letter, December 2018

A triple combination regimen including adoptive T cell therapy, a PIM kinase inhibitor, and a PD-1 inhibitor boosts T cell persistence and improves survival in a mouse model of melanoma, report investigators at the Medical University of South Carolina

MEDICAL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Adoptive cell transfer (ACT) is a promising cancer immunotherapy that involves isolating T cells from cancer patients that are capable of targeting their tumor, selecting the more active T cells and expanding those in the lab, and then transfusing them back into patients. ACT is already available in the clinic for some diseases — CAR T therapy, a form of ACT, was approved by the FDA in 2017 for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and adults with advanced lymphomas — and many clinical trials of another form of ACT are under way in melanoma.

Although ACT has produced dramatic results in some of these patients, not all respond, and the therapy has thus far proven less effective against solid tumors. Optimizing ACT could enable more patients with more types of cancer to benefit from the promising therapy.

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