The MedStar Georgetown University Hospital began implementing a new treatment for metastatic melanoma that fights a patient’s cancer using their own immune system and cancerous cells, the hospital announced Jan. 8.
The treatment, known as tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, targets melanoma, a particularly dangerous form of skin cancer, by harvesting a patient’s cancerous cells in a laboratory and training their white-blood immune cells to recognize and attack the tumor. MedStar Georgetown is the only hospital in the Washington, D.C., area, and one of the first in the country, to offer TIL therapy since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it in March 2024.
Dr. Geoffrey Gibney, an oncologist and the leader of the Melanoma Disease Group at MedStar Georgetown, a clinical research team studying melanoma, said TIL therapy offers a second or third line of defense for melanoma patients, providing a partial solution to gaps in existing treatment strategies.
“The therapies before TIL therapy worked well, but only in about half the patients,” Gibney told The Hoya. “About half of patients would unfortunately progress and that’s where TIL therapy comes in. It puts patients in a very durable or permanent remission — maybe even cure.”
Gibney worked with other researchers at academic hospitals and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a federal cancer research agency, to help pioneer TIL therapy research and implementation. To conduct TIL research, MedStar and other academic hospitals partnered with Iovance Biotherapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company focusing on cancer drugs.
Gibney said he encouraged MedStar Georgetown, which was involved in clinical trials with Iovance for TIL therapy separate from its FDA approval, to participate in collaborative cell therapy research for melanoma when he first joined in 2015.
“When I came here, we saw the opportunities to work with companies to open trials here at Georgetown,” Gibney said. “We were able to open trials here at Georgetown, to work between the physicians and the medical staff, as well as the administration to figure out the infrastructure. So we’ve been doing trials with TIL therapy as well as other cellular therapies for the last five years or so.”
David Perez (MED ’26), whose research focuses on skin cancer and health disparities, said the therapy could transform how physicians approach cancer treatment.
“It could prompt a larger trend toward cellular immunotherapies, marking a move away from traditional chemotherapies in favor of treatments that result in less undesirable side effects like hair loss,” Perez wrote to The Hoya. “This shift could dramatically change the way we think about cancer treatment, focusing on precision medicine and targeted therapies over-generalized, broad-spectrum approaches.”
Anthony Zisa (MED ’28), a medical student who has worked in immunotherapy research, said TIL therapy’s next step may be expansion to more hospitals across the country, including research beyond the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, the research arm of MedStar Georgetown.
“I think we’re going to see immunotherapy continue to grow, not only here at Lombardi, which has done such a great job of expanding this service, but across the U.S.,” Zisa said. “The goal is not to have MedStar and Lombardi be the only site forever.”
Perez said physicians must work to ensure equitable access to TIL therapy given its highly specialized and expensive nature.
“One way to improve access is by ensuring diverse populations are represented in clinical trials for new treatments like TIL therapy,” Perez wrote. “Other potential solutions could include working with insurance providers to ensure coverage for TIL therapy and seeking government funding to support the treatment of underinsured or uninsured patients.”
Janessa Mendoza (MED ’27) said while TIL therapy is an essential advancement, it does not negate the need for preventative education, particularly in underserved communities.
“I think it’s an impactful new innovative therapy, but from the public health perspective, I want to make sure we don’t have to depend on it,” Mendoza told The Hoya. “The need for public education remains so that we can implement a primary prevention strategy by spreading awareness about skin cancer.”
Gibney said he hopes to continue improving the treatment’s success since its first implementation in October 2024 and is excited by preliminary data indicating TIL therapy’s potential use for other forms of cancer.
“This approach is not just for melanoma — we are going to see this expand, we anticipate, for other solid tumor types, so it’s very exciting,” Gibney said. “Melanoma has really served as the springboard or the learning platform so that we can develop the treatment in different directions and help more patients. This is what we think the future of therapy is.”
