TIL Therapy Found More Effective for Metastatic Melanoma Than Current Treatments

A Phase III clinical trial has found tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, a new treatment for advanced melanoma, was more effective than ipilimumab, the leading existing therapy. The randomized, controlled study shows for the first time that cell therapy can be efficacious and beneficial for patients with solid cancers. “For patients with melanoma, we see a 50 percent reduction in the chance of progression of the disease or dying from the disease, which is absolutely practice-changing,” said John Haanen, MD, PhD, who is associated with the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and lead author of the clinical trial.

In the trial, 168 people with metastatic melanoma were randomly assigned to receive either TIL treatment or ipilimumab. Ipilimumab is typically used in people who don’t respond to a first-line treatment called anti-PD-1 therapy. Nearly all of the participants in the trial had not responded to that treatment. After following the patients for a median of almost three years, the researchers found that patients on TIL therapy had a 49 percent reduction in disease progression and death compared to 21 percent for people taking ipilimumab. The study participants are reportedly still being tracked, but the median overall time of survival for people who received TIL therapy was more than two years compared to slightly more than 1.5 years for those receiving ipilimumab.

TIL therapy is not widely known by the public and has not yet been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. However, it has been researched for several years in clinical trials and there has been much anticipation about its potential. TIL therapy is somewhat similar to CAR-T cell therapy, a recently developed immunotherapy treatment, but TIL therapy involves encouraging immune cells to multiply, as opposed to strengthening them.