On Thursday, Aug. 1, UPMC Enterprises welcomed Udai Kammula, MD, as a featured guest speaker at All Hands.
Dr. Kammula is an associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, Director of the Solid Tumor Cell Therapy Program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, and surgical oncologist in the Department of Gastrointestinal Surgical Oncology. His research and clinical work over the past 25 years has focused on cancer immunology, adoptive T cell transfer, gene therapy, and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL).
Our organization was eager to hear the latest updates from Dr. Kammula on his groundbreaking research at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center that is supported by the Translational Sciences team. Enterprises President Jeanne Cunicelli introduced our guest, noting that his work was an early project for the team and demonstrates, “just how far we have come.”
Dr. Kammula’s TIL therapy research and pioneering treatment involves extracting the most reactive T cells from a patient’s own tumor and expanding the cells outside the body before reintroducing them to the tumor. According to Dr. Kammula, TILs are “primed to fight the tumor” because they harness the patient’s own immune system to target and combat the cancer cells.
While other forms of immunotherapy have been very successful in treating skin melanoma, they have not shown positive results in other cancers. Dr. Kammula and his team applied their TIL approach to one of the most difficult cancers to treat —uveal melanoma. Drastically different from skin melanoma, uveal melanoma is an aggressive eye tumor that often spreads to the liver and has a very high mortality rate once metastasized. Patients are in desperate need of new and effective therapy.
Over the past several years of work, more than 50 patients have undergone TIL therapy at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. To underscore the impact of his research in TIL therapy for uveal melanoma, Dr. Kammula presented the case of a woman who, at age 32, was diagnosed with metastatic uveal melanoma and given only 16 months to live. After undergoing TIL therapy treatment with Dr. Kammula, she is now cancer-free and advocates for clinical trials and the therapy.
Dr. Kammula acknowledged this success, but seeks to further improve and scale the process so that more patients can benefit from this life-changing treatment.
UPMC Enterprises’ Translational Sciences team is working closely with Dr. Kammula on these initiatives to present to the FDA for approval to begin additional clinical trials.
“It’s tremendous to see sponsored research funding immediately translate into direct treatments for patients,” said John Lowman, Translational Sciences Senior Associate, “When you learn so much about what makes cancer immunotherapy work against hard-to-treat cancers, and give patients hope for a durable response at the same time, you know you’re in an incredibly unique and exciting position.”
The TIL program has achieved great milestones over the past five years and is nearing commercial readiness. His work was recently featured in Nature Communications, showcasing this pioneering research. Dr. Kammula plans to continue to push this research over the coming years to increase rates of success for cancer patients.
“Our goal is to offer TIL benefits to all patients with advanced solid tumors,” Dr. Kammula said. “Mirroring the stories of our heroic patients, this fight against cancer will be won one battle at a time.”
