NEW MELANOMA TUMOR TREATMENT
AGROUNDBREAKING new treatment for advanced melanoma, one of the deadliest types of cancer, has been green-lighted by the FDA! The drug Amtagvi offers hope to patients with advanced forms of the skin cancer that can’t be surgically removed or have spread to other parts of the body.
It is the first cell therapy FDA-approved to treat solid tumors. Cell therapy replaces cancerous cells with healthy cells from another person or, in this case, from the patient themselves.
“This is going to be huge,” says oncologist Dr. Elizabeth Buchbinder of the DanaFarber Cancer Institute in Boston. With melanoma, “you start running out of options fast.” Melanoma is the most invasive skin cancer and has the highest risk of death, although it’s highly curable if caught early. Developed by Iovance Biotherapeutics, the treatment, known as tumorinfiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) therapy, utilizes immune cells obtained from the cancer itself. The naturally occurring cells are able to recognize and attack the specific cancer, but advanced melanoma patients usually don’t have enough of them to eliminate all the malignancies.
So the cancerfighting cells from the tumor are extracted and then multiplied in a lab to create billions of cells, a process that takes 22 days. Meanwhile, the patient undergoes chemotherapy to kill off their existing immune cells and make room for the tumor-specific ones. The lab-grown cells are then infused back into the patient. FDA approval for Amtagvi was fast-tracked after clinical data showed tumors shrank in about one-third of patients who received the therapy. Of those, half saw their tumors shrink for at least a year and some even disappeared, results that far exceeded those of existing melanoma treatments.
In a Netherlands study, 20 percent of TIL therapy patients achieved complete remission compared to just 7 percent of patients given ipilimumab, another immunotherapy treatment. “These immune cells stay in the body and live in the body for decades,” says Dr. Patrick Hwu, of the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. He hopes “future TIL therapy will be important for lung, colon, head and neck, bladder and other cancers.” The American Cancer Society predicts over 100,000 Americans will be diagnosed with melanoma and about 8,000 patients will die of the disease in 2024.