Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs) Open New Era in Cancer Treatment

July 24, 2018

WELLESLEY, Mass., July 24, 2018 – Adoptive cell therapies (ACTs), and recently the infusion of autologous or redirected tumor-specific T-cells, have the potential to drastically impact the treatment of a variety of cancers, especially common epithelial cancers.

The BCC Research report Adoptive Transfer of Autologous Lymphocytes Targeting Somatically Mutated Genes: Success in Common Epithelial Cancers with Low Mutation Rates, Gastrointestinal, Bile Duct and Breast Cancers provides an essential briefing on this revolutionary cancer therapy. The report summarizes the current state of clinical research and trials and explains the impact of ACTs on the treatment of several metastasized malignancies, while and raising important concerns about the scalability and compatibility of TILs treatments.

Report Highlights and Implication:

• Significant successes have been made treating patients with previously incurable metastatic breast cancer, late-stage cholangiocarcinoma and Stage III C colorectal cancer through TILs.
• There has been a meteoric increase in the total number of clinical trials being conducted to investigate the safety and efficacy of TILs. By the end of April 2018, over 240 clinical trials investigating the use and incorporating TILs were documented.
• Rarely do entirely new methods of treating cancer enter the fray with such dramatic results as those shown for TILs, but there are still several hurdles to overcome before TIL therapies enter the mainstream.
• Standardized methods of evaluating TILs in different types of cancers are urgently required, as are easily reproducible cell expansion processing and in vivo monitoring. New animal models are a high priority.
• The therapeutic effect of combining TILs with new immunotherapies or other treatment combinations, urgently needs further investigation.

“If and when larger trials corroborate the results that have been achieved to date, then researchers need to turn their attention to the practical issues associated with producing individualized T-cell therapies for each patient at an affordable price,” said Paul Taylor, BCC Research analyst and author of this report. “There are significant logistical and technical challenges to overcome, requiring specialist laboratories and expertise associated with this technique.”

On this topic, Dr. Jonas Nilsson, Director, Sahlgrenska Cancer Center, explains in the report that “New animal models are needed that can better capture the heterogeneity between patients’ tumors, and to study mechanisms of the rise of resistance.” 

“It won’t work for every cancer, but it has been proven to work for several of the least treatable conditions,” said Taylor, “and what we learn from those most extreme cases will be applied in combination therapy to more mainstream patients.”

Editors/reporters requesting analyst interviews should contact Eric Surber at press@bccresearch.com.

Adoptive Transfer of Autologous Lymphocytes Targeting Somatically Mutated Genes: Success In Common Epithelial Cancers with Low Mutation Rates, Gastrointestinal, Bile Duct and Breast Cancers( BIO171A )
Publish Date: Jul 2018    

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