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Immune cells that have already found their way into the tumour are harvested, grown to billions, and returned.
Lifileucel (Amtagvi, Iovance) was approved in 2024 for anti-PD-1-refractory melanoma: ORR 31%, five-year data show durable responses in about a third of responders. Trials in NSCLC (TILVANCE-301), cervical, and head and neck cancer. Next-generation TILs are gene-edited (PD-1 knockout, IL-15 membrane-bound, OBX-115) to reduce IL-2 dependence.
Surgical harvest → ex vivo expansion of polyclonal tumour-reactive T cells with IL-2 → lymphodepletion → infusion with IL-2 support.
Nothing in the corpus depends on this yet.
Dependencies are what this technology cannot be delivered without: manufacturing steps, instruments, software, upstream methods. See its full chain on the map.
High-dose interleukin-2 was the first immunotherapy to cure a small fraction of patients with metastatic melanoma and kidney cancer, at the cost of ICU-level toxicity; today it mainly supports TIL therapy.
Lifileucel was the first approved TIL therapy: the patient's own tumour-fighting immune cells are expanded to billions and given back.
Tacquell is a tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy for melanoma developed by the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the academic group whose randomised trial first showed TIL therapy could beat ipilimumab. Europe's medicines committee gave it a negative opinion in June 2026, so it is not authorised.
This trial supplied the randomised proof that was missing for TIL therapy and showed academic centres can run cell-therapy phase 3 trials without industry. It supports TIL as a standard option after checkpoint inhibitor failure in melanoma and underpinned reimbursement in the Netherlands. The comparator, ipilimumab, is itself only modestly effective in this setting, and overall survival did not differ significantly.
Lifileucel proved that Steven Rosenberg's decades-old TIL concept could be industrialised into a licensed product and gave patients with checkpoint-refractory melanoma, who otherwise have few options, a chance of durable remission. It is the first cell therapy approved for any solid tumour. The treatment requires surgery to harvest tumour, hospitalisation for lymphodepletion and IL-2, and specialised centres, so its reach is limited.
It showed that a single academic centre outside the United States could run tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy at scale and get durable remissions, and it quantified the attrition that intent-to-treat reporting exposes and single-arm treated-patient reporting hides.
Query for this technology: (TITLE:"tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy" OR ABSTRACT:"tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy" OR TITLE:"TIL therapy" OR ABSTRACT:"TIL therapy" OR TITLE:"lifileucel" OR ABSTRACT:"lifileucel"). Results are unfiltered search hits about TIL therapy, not a curated reading list.
Shares Patrick Hwu, Public cell-therapy foundries at cancer centres for academics and start-ups, Steven A. Rosenberg, Hospital-exemption cell therapies at scale, backed by a shared registry.
Shares Gal Markel, Michal Besser, Jacob Schachter, Sheba Medical Center.
Shares Yardena Samuels, Vaccines aimed only at mutations shared by every tumour cell, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) / Ludwig Institute Lausanne, Immunotherapy.
Shares An open interoperability standard for closed automated cell-processing machines, Digital batch records and AI process control to halve cell therapy batch failures, Public cell-therapy foundries at cancer centres for academics and start-ups, Manufacturing cost and time for living and radioactive medicines.
Shares Grow tumour organoids together with the patient's own immune cells, Vaccines aimed only at mutations shared by every tumour cell, Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM), Select patients for cell therapy by whether their tumour holds reactive T cells.
Shares Shared modular GMP facilities for academic personalised vaccines and cell products, Hospital-exemption cell therapies at scale, backed by a shared registry, Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI-AvL), Manufacturing cost and time for living and radioactive medicines.
Shares Yardena Samuels, Shared modular GMP facilities for academic personalised vaccines and cell products, Vaccines aimed only at mutations shared by every tumour cell, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) / Ludwig Institute Lausanne.
Shares An open interoperability standard for closed automated cell-processing machines, Digital batch records and AI process control to halve cell therapy batch failures, Public cell-therapy foundries at cancer centres for academics and start-ups, Michal Besser.
Open-source projects that implement or serve this technology, from OnCo's own catalogue: licence and last activity as the repository reported them on the day of the fetch. Listing is not endorsement; check the licence before reuse and the validation before clinical use.
Reconstructs T-cell and B-cell receptor repertoires from bulk or single-cell RNA-seq of tumours.