Physicians at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and Copenhagen University Hospital tested whether growing a patient's own tumor-fighting white blood cells outside the body, then infusing billions of them back in, could outperform a standard immune checkpoint drug.
In a trial of 168 patients with advanced, mostly treatment-resistant melanoma, half received the lab-grown tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and half received ipilimumab. Median progression-free survival was 7.2 months with the cell therapy versus 3.1 months with ipilimumab, and tumors shrank in 49 percent of the cell-therapy group versus 21 percent on the drug.
The cell therapy requires removing a piece of tumor, growing the infiltrating immune cells by the billions over several weeks, and giving chemotherapy to clear space for them before infusion, a far more involved process than an injected drug. It is now approved for advanced melanoma in the United States, and it is being tested earlier in treatment and against other solid tumors.
Read the original study
Rohaan et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2022 · doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2210233
The patient's own tumor became the medicine.
Source
- Rohaan, M. W., Borch, T. H., van den Berg, J. H., Met, Ö., Kessels, R., Geukes Foppen, M. H., Stoltenborg Granhøj, J., Nuijen, B., Nijenhuis, C., Jedema, I., van Zon, M., Scheij, S., Beijnen, J. H., Hansen, M., Voermans, C., Noringriis, I. M., Monberg, T. J., Holmstroem, R. B., Wever, L. D., . . . Haanen, J. B. (2022). Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocyte Therapy or Ipilimumab in Advanced Melanoma. New England Journal of Medicine, 387(23), 2113–2125. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2210233