ESMO Immuno-Oncology 2025 | Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and cancer vaccines in melanoma
Inge Marie Svane, MD, PhD, Herlev University Hospital, Herlev, Denmark, highlights the potential of tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy in patients refractory to checkpoint inhibitors. While TIL therapy will be an important player in this setting, it is an intensive treatment that requires accessible tumor lesions, and therefore, other approaches such as cancer vaccines may be more suitable for some patients. This interview took place at 2025 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Immuno-Oncology Congress in London, UK.
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Transcript
Yes, so I definitely believe that they will be some of the important players in checkpoint inhibitor refractory patients. At the moment, the most well-documented therapy in the second line is the TIL therapy. We have response rates in PD-1 refractory patients of almost 50% if they have not been treated also with the RAF-MEK inhibitors. So for the Iovance lifileucel product, it’s around 30%, but for the other one from the phase 3 trial, the academic product, it was almost 50%...
Yes, so I definitely believe that they will be some of the important players in checkpoint inhibitor refractory patients. At the moment, the most well-documented therapy in the second line is the TIL therapy. We have response rates in PD-1 refractory patients of almost 50% if they have not been treated also with the RAF-MEK inhibitors. So for the Iovance lifileucel product, it’s around 30%, but for the other one from the phase 3 trial, the academic product, it was almost 50%. So definitely they will be a player, but it’s also important to emphasize that this is not for every patient. It’s very intensive treatment. And also you need accessible tumor lesions to resect, to establish a TIL product. So I believe for those patients, it will be more important also to look further into the use of cancer vaccines. And we do have some ongoing trials with a very personalized vaccine based on neoantigen expression. But we do also have other kinds of cancer vaccines, which are more general for these patients, not targeting a specific neoantigen, but for example, targeting immunosuppression by PD-L1 and IDO. And here we saw, yeah, at the ESPO conference, we saw data on metastatic patients refractory to checkpoint inhibitors with indication of response rate, which was kind of supporting the concept. But also we did see also the presentation at ESMO as a first-line therapy where you actually try to lower the level of refractory patients by adding the vaccine up front in the first line.
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