Chemical castration of melanoma patients does not increase the frequency of tumor-specific CD4 and CD8 T cells after peptide vaccination.

Peptide vaccination against tumor-associated antigens remains one of the most common methods of immunization in cancer vaccine clinical trials. Although peptide vaccination has been reported to increase circulating antigen-specific T-cells, they have had limited clinical efficacy and there is a necessity to increase their capacity to generate strong antitumor responses. We sought to improve the clinical efficacy of peptide-based vaccines in cancer immunotherapy of metastatic melanoma using a LHRH agonist (leuprolide) as adjuvant.

Specific lymphocyte subsets predict response to adoptive cell therapy using expanded autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in metastatic melanoma patients.

Purpose: Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) using autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) is a promising treatment for metastatic melanoma unresponsive to conventional therapies. We report here on the results of an ongoing phase II clinical trial testing the efficacy of ACT using TIL in patients with metastatic melanoma and the association of specific patient clinical characteristics and the phenotypic attributes of the infused TIL with clinical response.

Experimental Design: Altogether, 31 transiently lymphodepleted patients were treated with their expanded TIL, followed by two cycles of high-dose interleukin (IL)-2 therapy.

Impact of clinical and pathologic features on tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte expansion from surgically excised melanoma metastases for adoptive T-cell therapy.

Purpose: Clinical trials on adoptive T-cell therapy (ACT) using expanded tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) have shown response rates of over 50% in refractory melanoma. However, little is known how clinical and pathologic features impact TIL outgrowth isolated from metastatic melanoma tumors.

Experimental Design: We analyzed the impact of clinical and pathologic features on initial TIL outgrowth in 226 consecutive patients undergoing tumor resection.