The University of Chicago Medicine is among the first 30 institutions in the country to offer tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy for advanced melanoma, immediately activating as an authorized treatment center after federal regulators approved the treatment on February 16, 2024.

TILs are…

---

Some patients with advanced melanomas — those that can’t be surgically removed or have spread to other parts of the body — don’t respond to standard treatment options such as immunotherapies and targeted therapies. TIL therapy gives these patients another therapeutic option: a completely personalized treatment made from the patient’s own cells that needs to be administered only once, since the cells remain in the body and keep performing their tumor-attacking duties.

Other cell therapies, such as CAR T-cell therapies, are currently approved only for blood cancers like leukemia. TIL therapy, which showed promising results in clinical trials, is the first FDA-approved cell therapy to treat solid tumors.

UChicago Medicine is helping lead continuing research into TILs even while offering the newly approved therapy to patients. Medical oncologists and scientists at the David and Etta Jonas Center for Cellular Therapy are currently studying TIL therapy for cervical cancer in a clinical trial, with plans to study TILs for even more tumor types in the future.

During a sunny morning on Florida’s Gulf Coast last month, an 11-year-old golden retriever named Hunter bounded through a pine grove.

---

A Yale researcher developed a vaccine that can slow or halt certain cancers in dogs. And it could be used to treat humans in the future.