Jeff, my wife is also at Hopkins with Evan Lipson and Megan Schollenberger. I came here this morning looking for some TILs experiences which I remembered seeing when she was diagnosed last summer. My wife has progressed on standard of care and 3 weeks ago we went to MSK and UPMC to discuss trials. The consensus was the Iovance TILs were preferred but she doesn’t currently qualify and regardless they are on some kind of a short pause accepting new patients into the cutaneous trials. MSK thought she had a little time to wait, Hopkins thought she didn’t have the time. Over the past week it has become clear that she doesn’t. The docs at Hopkins, UPMC and MSK huddled up yesterday after another scan and an experiment pausing braf/mek. Their recommendation is to immediately pursue the Immatics ATC/IMA203/TILs trial at UPMC that uses leukapheresis instead of resection to harvest the tils. UPMC is calling this morning to discuss the remaining screening. She is still not a lock to qualify. Her remaining tumor might be too large, she had multiple severe irae’s from ipi/nivo and the required 14 day washout from braftovi/mektovi might not be achievable. Your description of the process is very helpful. Apart from the harvesting the process is almost the same. My wife understands it in general but I want her to truly understand what this process will likely entail.
We had a call with Megan last week where she mentioned the TILs experiences/outcomes for her patients and at the end said “and one patient who is just finishing up the treatment so it’s to soon to tell”. I’ll bet that is you. Good luck.
Ed Williams, this is Rich O’C from the stage 4 FB group. Which I found last fall from one of your posts in this forum.
