It doesn’t work for everyone
“TIL therapy doesn’t work that well for everyone,” points out Haanen, an internist-oncologist at the AVL. “For some people with skin cancer, this therapy does much less, or nothing at all. We’re trying to figure out why that is and what we can do about it.”
Researchers are also looking at what happens to other cancers when they’re treated with TIL therapy. “We are now conducting research on lung and cervical cancer, and hopefully breast cancer in the future as well,” says Haanen. “Hopefully this form of immunotherapy will work for that group of cancer patients as well.”
65,000 euros per patient
There are even more developments happening in oncology and this has everything to do with the cost of the treatments. TIL therapy is currently still relatively expensive, costing around €65,000 per patient per year, but according to Haanen it could become cheaper if it becomes available to more patients.
“We didn’t need help from the pharmaceutical industry in our research,” he says. “We largely facilitate and manufacture the treatment ourselves, here in the hospital and at cost. This is a completely different amount than a pharmaceutical company would ask. So it will soon be a factor of 5.”
Approved by the EMA?
The AVL is therefore taking the special step of applying for approval for TIL therapy from the European Medicines Agency (EMA). This week, KWF Cancer Control awarded €3.8 million to the Amsterdam hospital to speed up the rather cumbersome registration of TIL therapy as a medicine.
“Immunotherapy is one of the biggest recent breakthroughs in cancer research. We fund a lot of research, but we also want the results to reach the patient as quickly as possible,” says Director Van de Gronden.
