ESMO News: Innovative tumor therapy TILs cell therapy is coming, and clinical trials have been carried out!

When it comes to immunotherapy, people generally think of PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitors, but immunotherapy includes a wide range of treatments, such as tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TILs) therapy

What is tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy? By the method of in vitro culture, the infiltration of lymphocytes in tumor tissue is enriched, enhanced function, and then infused back to tumor patients, which is expected to exert anti-tumor effects, and better therapeutic effect

Origin of tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy

As early as 1986, the team of the immune world giant Rosenberg discovered the presence

Figure 1.

Data from the latest Phase III clinical trials of TILs therapy

Just now at the European Annual Meeting of Clinical Oncology (ESMO), Professor John Haanen reported on the breakthrough results

A total of 168 patients with advanced melanoma who could not be surgically removed participated in the study, and patients were randomly divided into two groups, one patient using the CTLA-4 inhibitor ipimumab and the other group using TILs immunotherapy

Figure 2.

The results showed that the median progression-free survival time was 7.
2 months for patients receiving TILs therapy, while the median progression-free survival for patients receiving ipimuzumab was only 3.
1 months
.

Compared with the CTLA-4 inhibitor ipimumab, TILs therapy reduces the risk of disease progression or death from the disease by 50%, which will be a breakthrough
in rewriting clinical treatment guidelines.

Figure 3.
Progression-free survival was significantly better in patients in the TILs group than ipimumab

There was also a wide gap in treatment response rates, with treatment response rates of 49% in patients receiving TILs and only 21% in the ipimumab group, nearly doubling
.

There were also significant differences in median total survival, with median overall survival of 25.
8 months for TILs therapy compared to only 18.
9 months
for ipimuzumab.

Figure 4.
Treatment response rate for two groups of treatments

Although all patients involved in TILs therapy and 57% of patients in the ipimumab group experienced adverse reactions of grade 3 or higher, adverse reactions were well controlled and most of the adverse reactions disappeared
when discharged from the hospital after treatment with TILs.

What happens after PD-1 inhibitors treat drug resistance?

At present, PD-1 inhibitors have been used for first-line treatment of a variety of malignancies, but once treatment fails, later treatment options will be few
.

In the study above, 89 percent of patients did not participate in clinical trials
until after PD-1 inhibitor therapy failed.

Researcher Professor Haanen showed that the main mechanism of PD-1 inhibitor treatment of drug resistance is the tumor microenvironment, immune cell exhaustion or suppressed by the signal sent by the tumor, can not work
.

If immune cells are removed from the body, reactivated under laboratory conditions, and cultured enough to re-infuse them into the patient, there is a chance that the mechanism
of immune evasion can be overcome.

The dawn of a variety of solid tumors

TILs cell therapies may be effective for most solid tumors, and clinical trials are currently underway for a variety of cancers, including lung, cervical, head and neck cancers, and more
.

Figure 5.
Clinical trials of TILs are gradually increasing

As shown in the figure above, a number of clinical trials on TILs are being actively carried out, and cancer has also helped many patients participate in some clinical trials, such as esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, lung cancer, gastric cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, etc
.

We remind everyone to apply for clinical trials of TILs cells when the physical condition is relatively good, especially after the diagnosis or recurrence, the number of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes taken out of the tumor lesion is large enough to be successfully cultured in vitro, so that the best treatment effect
can be achieved.

You can click the "Global Clinical Trials" applet below this article to actively apply for clinical trials
of TILs cell therapy.

Now the enrollment is free treatment, if it is approved to be listed later, it will be more expensive to use
.

Every day when cancer is not completely overcome, cancer is with you to spend it!

References:

Annals of Oncology, Volume 33 Supplement 7, September 2022.
 www.
esmo.
org/meetings/esmo-congress-2022

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