Researchers have discovered a new treatment for advanced melanoma during the Phase 3 clinical trial. They claim that it is far more effective than the existing leading therapy for metastatic melanoma.
The scientists at the Netherlands Cancer Institute said that the new treatment uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer, and added that its therapy is similar to another type of treatment that has proven to be highly effective for blood cancers, called CAR-T therapy.
Under CAR-T therapy, patients’ T-cells are harvested and modified in the lab into cancer fighters. These modified cells are then infused back into the patient.
Similarly in the melanoma trial, the researchers used an approach called TIL therapy, which involves harvesting a patient’s immune cells—tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes, which are taken from the tumour.
But instead of modifying these tumour cells in the lab like the CAR-T therapy, they’re simply amplified to produce billions of immune cells.
Those amplified immune cells are then injected back into the patient’s blood, where they work to kill the cancer.
Dr John Haanen, a medical oncologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, who led the new clinical trial, told NBC News, “We expand them from a million cells to several billion cells.”
The results of the trial were presented at the ESMO Congress 2022 meeting in Paris on Saturday.
To base their hypothesis, the doctors conducted a random trail and assigned 168 patients with metastatic melanoma to receive either TIL treatment or the current standard treatment—an immunotherapy drug called ipilimumab.
Ipilimumab treatment is used in people who don’t respond to a first-line treatment called anti-PD-1 therapy. Notably, all of the patients in the trial had not responded to that treatment.
After observing for three years, the scientists found that people on TIL therapy had a 50% reduction in disease progression and death compared to those who were treated with ipilimumab.
20 per cent of people on TIL therapy saw their tumours disappear completely, compared to 7 per cent in the ipilimumab group.
Though they are still being observed, the median survival time of cancer patients who received TIL therapy was found to be over two years, compared to just over 1.5 years on ipilimumab therapy, researchers found.
(With inputs from agencies)
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