Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocyte (TIL) Therapy

Tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy is a form of immunotherapy that uses your own cells to fight cancer. Like CAR-T cell therapy, it’s a type of cell transfer therapy where T-cells are moved from your body to a lab and then back to you.

University of Maryland Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMGCCC) offers TIL therapy to treat a few types of cancer, and is conducting clinical trials to eventually use it on more.

How TIL Therapy Works

TIL therapy takes certain immune cells (T lymphocytes) found on your tumor and tests them in a lab to see which ones can best identify tumors in your body. The effective cells are treated with substances so they grow in large numbers, for about two to eight weeks. When ready, they’re transferred back to your body to find the cancerous tumors and attack them.

While T cells are growing in the lab, you receive radiation, chemotherapy or whatever treatment doctors prescribe. This helps eliminate other immune cells and make the lab-grown T cells more effective when they’re reinserted into your body.

TIL therapy is currently only FDA-approved to treat advanced melanoma. It’s being studied in clinical trials to treat other cancers.

Benefits of TIL Therapy

• Fewer side effects – TIL therapy can have fewer side effects than traditional cancer treatment like radiation and chemo. This is because you’re using your body’s own cells, so there’s less chance of rejection or adverse reaction to what’s going in your body.
• Long-term effectiveness – TIL therapy helps your body attack cancerous tumors for months or years. The effects are meant to linger, while other treatments wear off quickly.
• Improved outcome – While it’s still being studied, TIL therapy has shown to lead to complete or partial remission in cases other treatments have failed.

Getting TIL Therapy at UMGCCC

TIL therapy is available at UMGCCC for melanoma, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, lung cancer, genitourinary cancers and a growing list of cancer types.

UMGCCC is conducting clinical trials to test TIL therapy’s effectiveness for head and neck cancer, with more to come.

To hear more about TIL therapy at UMGCCC, call 410-328-7904 or 1-800-888-8823 to make an appointment with a UMGCCC medical oncologist.