Early findings from a small clinical trial provide evidence that a new cellular immunotherapy approach may be effective in treating metastatic solid tumors. In the trial, researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) genetically engineered normal white blood cells, known as lymphocytes, from each patient to produce receptors that recognize and attack their specific cancer cells. These initial findings are from people with metastatic colorectal cancer who had already undergone multiple earlier treatments.
The personalized immunotherapy shrank tumors in several patients and was able to keep the tumors from regrowing for up to seven months. The findings were published July 11, 2024, in Nature Medicine . One form of cellular immunotherapy, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, has already been shown to be effective against some blood cancers, and another, called tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, has proven to be effective against metastatic melanoma .
However, to date, a cellular therapy that's effective against any other solid cancers has been elusive, according to Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D.
, Ph.D., of NCI's Center for Cancer Research (CCR), who co-led the study with Maria Parkhurst, Ph.
D., of CCR's Surgery Branch. The fact that we can take a growing metastatic solid cancer and get it to regress shows that the new cellular immunotherapy approach has promise.
However, it's important to understand that these findings are preliminary and that the appr.