Adoptive
therapy of
cancer has been mostly tested in advanced
cancer patients using tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL). Following discouraging results likely due to poor
tumor-specificity of TIL and/or high
tumor burden, recent studies reiterate the enormous potential of this
therapy, particularly in
melanoma. We had performed a phase II/III randomised trial on 88 stage III
melanoma patients, who received autologous TIL plus
IL-2 or
IL-2 alone, after complete tumour resection. We reported previously clinical and immunological results supporting the ability of
tumor reactive TIL infusion to prevent further development of the
melanoma disease and to increase overall survival of patients bearing only one
tumor invaded lymph node. The absence of correlation between overall and disease-free survival and the amount of infused
tumor-specific TIL suggested that therapeutic efficiency might depend on other parameters such as
antigen specificity, function or persistence of TIL. Here we studied the recognition of a panel of 38 shared
tumor-associated
antigens (TAA) by TIL infused to the patients included in this assay, in order to determine if treatment outcome could correlate with particular
antigen specificities of infused TIL. Results show that the infusion of
Melan-A/MART-1 reactive TIL appears to be associated with a longer relapse-free survival for
HLA-A2 patients. These results further support the relevance of
Melan-A/
MART-1 antigen as a prime target for
immunotherapy protocols in
melanoma.