Immunotherapy for Advanced Pancreatic Cancer and Other Solid Tumors
Will a type of immunotherapy developed from a patient’s tumor be an effective treatment against pancreatic cancer and other solid tumors, including ovarian cancer and osteosarcoma?
Researchers are looking at the effectiveness of a combination of immunotherapies plus chemotherapy to treat solid tumors that have not responded to other treatment or have returned.
Creating Immunotherapy From a Patient’s Tumor
Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) are a type of immune cell that has moved from the blood into a tumor to try to kill cancer cells. TILs obtained from a patient’s own tumor are called autologous TILs.
Autologous TILs are given with the growth factor interleukin-2 (IL-2) because research has shown that IL-2 helps TILs recognize and attack tumor cells more effectively.
In this Trial
To participate, pancreatic cancer patients must have had prior treatment that has stopped being effective or has not halted the disease. For the personalized immunotherapy, TILs will be collected from each patient’s tumor and grown in the lab. The TILS will be activated to recognize the patient’s tumor once they are reinfused into the patient’s blood system.
All participants will receive the stimulating factor IL-2 together with the immunotherapy as well as the chemotherapy drugs cyclophosphamide, which interferes with DNA replication so the tumor cannot grow, and fludarabine, a medication used to treat leukemia and lymphoma, which inhibits DNA synthesis in cells and is often used with cyclophosphamide.
Researchers are looking at the effectiveness of the combination treatment at slowing the progress of the cancer.
We encourage you to consult your physicians for clinical trials that may be right for you. The website ClinicalTrials.gov provides more details about this trial as well as many others. You can visit the Let’s Win Trial Finder for a listing of all active pancreatic cancer clinical trials.
This trial remains active but is no longer recruiting participants.
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