By Netherlands Cancer Institute
A patient’s own immune cells, expanded into an army of billions of immune cells in a specialized laboratory, can be used as a living drug against metastatic melanoma, an aggressive type of skin cancer, as the TIL trial has shown. The TIL trial, the world’s first comparative phase 3 trial in solid tumors in general, is looking into the effect of T cell therapy in melanoma. Now that the results have been presented, the Dutch National Health Care Institute will assess whether TIL therapy could become a standard treatment, meaning that it will be incorporated into the basic health insurance package.
Medical oncologist John Haanen from the Netherlands Cancer Institute, who is leading the TIL trial, is very pleased with the results: “Remember: these are metastatic melanoma patients. Ten years ago, melanoma had such a bad prognosis that I would be seeing an entirely new patient population every year – but now I’ve been seeing some patients for ten years. This is largely due to the discovery of immunotherapy, which has revolutionized treatment for melanoma. But we still see that about half of the people diagnosed with metastatic melanoma succumb within five years, so we’re still not where we want to be – not at all. 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 prior immunotherapies have failed.”