Photo: CC0 via Pixabay
A metastatic skin cancer therapy in which the patient’s own immune cells play the lead role works well for some people.
Researchers from, among others, the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) state that in one in five patients in their study, skin cancer even disappears as a result of therapy.
According to NKI researcher John Haanen, it is a “living medicine”. In metastatic skin cancer, the tumors are surrounded by cells of their own body, which try in vain to clear up the cancer. Researchers remove these cells from the body and “activate” them again. This creates an army of billions of immune cells, which are returned to the patient’s body. In half of the people in the study, the tumor shrank after this, in about twenty percent the cancer even disappeared.
The study included 168 patients with metastatic skin cancer, most of whom had failed previous treatments. Half of them received the therapy (called TIL), the rest received “regular” immunotherapy. In that control group, the cancer disappeared in 7 percent of cases.
According to Haanen, smaller studies have already been done with the TIL treatment, but this is the first time that the results have been compared with those of a control group. This is a so-called ‘phase 3 study’, meaning that the treatment has already been shown to work. The purpose of a phase 3 study is to determine whether the therapy is even more effective than standard treatment for the cancer in question.
The costs for TIL treatment are much lower than for existing therapies. According to the internist-oncologist, the immunotherapy developed by pharmaceutical companies costs from around 300,000 to 400,000 euros per patient, the TIL treatment around 65,000 euros.
For patients with metastatic skin cancer, this “may mean a new chance to get rid of their disease,” says Haanen. She hopes the treatment will become available to this group as early as next year. Since the research was conducted on people who had already tried other treatments in the majority of cases, only that group should be eligible for TIL therapy, she thinks. Also, doctors can only remove tissue from metastases that are in an accessible location in the body. This doesn’t apply to all patients, admits Haanen.
The research was co-financed by the Ministry of Health.
