TIL Therapy Entering the Mainstream

Melanomas have long been considered to be immunogenic tumors. Although anti-programmed death 1 (PD-1) therapy has been approved worldwide as first-line treatment, many patients do not benefit from it, so there is an important therapeutic gap. Adoptive cell therapy with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) was described in the 1980s by Rosenberg and colleagues.(1) This personalized treatment for cancer is based on the infusion of autologous T lymphocytes that have been obtained directly from surgically removed autologous tumors and then expanded in culture with the use of interleukin-2 stimulation. Both preconditioning lymphodepletion with high-dose, nonmyeloablative chemotherapy and the intravenous administration of high-dose . . .