Potential Impact of Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes on Melanoma Treatment

Ryan Sullivan, MD, associate professor, Medicine, Harvard Medical School and associate professor, Hematology/Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital, explains how tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) could impact the melanoma treatment landscape if approved by the FDA.

Transcript:

0:08 | Having a therapy that's totally a different type of therapy than what we have available offers a lot of potential. One next step may be combining it with the things we already have. It may be combined with anti PD-1, anti-PD-1 plus anti CTLA4, or anti-PD-1 and LAG3. It may also be explored in earlier lines of therapy or in the refractory space.

0:40 | There's some data with other compounds that suggested that combining these types of drugs with a novel immunotherapy could be useful, even if patients had previously been treated with an anti-PD-1-based regimen. I think that's the second thing, that there may be combinations of therapies that currently are being studied, and it potentially could be a next step beyond just having TIL. The other thing is that there are a lot of ways of modifying and manipulating cells. If you’re getting a TIL harvest from a patient, it's entirely possible that there are ways to make those TIL better. You could select for tumor antigen specific T cells. You can select or treat those cells in a way to make them a better TIL. There's data that's been generated from a lot of labs in this space trying to come up with a better way of not necessarily giving TIL, but a better product that they can generate just by doing certain modifications after the TIL is harvested and before patients receive the TIL.