Meet Chris White (4 years cancer-free)
Chris White tried nearly every possible treatment option available to beat his melanoma. Yet, after three surgeries, multiple rounds of chemotherapy, and three attempts with immunotherapy, he was told to consider hospice care and get his end-of-life affairs in order.
That was December 2019. Remarkably, today, Chris is cancer-free – all thanks to a novel cell and gene therapy he received in a clinical trial.
“There has been this belief in the world that there will never be a cure for cancer,” Chris says. “Cell and gene therapy feels like a cure. This is winning the war, not just the battle. This is the future of modern medicine.”
Chris White’s cancer diagnosis.
The first sign of Chris’ cancer was a lump on his rectum. At first, he thought it was a hemorrhoid, but it didn’t disappear, and a second lump appeared in his right groin.
Alarmed, Chris went to his primary doctor. Two rounds of an antibiotic didn’t help, so he met with a general surgeon. A biopsy revealed the lump was from a swollen lymph node, and the pathology report said he had a rare form of metastatic melanoma.
He was diagnosed in July 2018 at the age of 36 years old. The next few years fighting this cancer were nothing short of tumultuous.
After meeting doctors at Texas Oncology, Chris got the lump removed from his rectum. Then he began seeing doctors at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he learned the disease was a type of melanoma called anorectal mucosal melanoma, which usually forms in the mucous membranes of the anus or rectum.
Chris also learned his cancer was still local to his pelvic region. At the time, surgery to remove lymph nodes (called a lymphadenectomy) followed by radiation therapy was the best plan.
After 20 lymph nodes were removed at the end of August 2018 and radiation therapy in October that attacked any remaining melanoma cells in his rectum, Chris had to recover and wait until the end of November to find out where he stood.
Metastasis and ongoing treatment.
Another lump appeared in Chris’ groin area, and a scan in November showed the melanoma had returned. Worse, the cancer had metastasized to the liver, the lungs, and his thoracic inlet.
The next treatment plan was a combination of two immunotherapy drugs: Opdivo and Yervoy. They were unable to control Chris’ cancer, which by January 2019 had spread to near his kidney. Cancerous nodules on his lungs had doubled to “an innumerable amount,” his scan report read.
At the advice of his doctors at MD Anderson, he switched his treatment plan to chemotherapy with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda. This seemed to slow the disease a bit, and he again tried the combination of Opdivo and Yervoy while also receiving targeted radiation to the larger masses in his lungs and neoplasm next to his right kidney. Unfortunately, by the end of May 2019, Chris developed a severe case of Colitis and halted all treatments until he could resolve the inflammation and taper off the steroids. Chris’s disease remained stable during this time, until he could resume treatment again in August.
“Immunotherapy was supposed to be the long-term end-game, but I couldn’t go back to it due to the toxicities. I didn’t know what to do.” — Cancer survivor Chris White
With no other options left to try, Chris turned to a cell and gene therapy clinical trial in hopes of saving his life.
Clinical trial opens for TIL therapy.
In October 2019, after more than a year of fighting his cancer with no prolonged success, Chris was approached about enrolling in a clinical trial. There was one testing a cell and gene therapy for unresectable metastatic melanoma, and Chris was eligible for it.
Chris’ cancer was advanced, and he had progressed while he was receiving prior lines of therapy. These were the main qualifying criteria to enroll, and the study was already producing hopeful results for other participants with mucosal melanoma.
Cell and gene therapies harness the power of the immune system to attack cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. Chris didn’t know what cell and gene therapy was. He had only heard of CAR T-cell therapy – a type of cell and gene therapy in which a patient’s T cells are genetically reprogrammed to attack cancer – but didn’t know much about it.
Even though this type of cancer treatment was foreign language to Chris, he wanted to try it.
The clinical trial Chris would join was for a type of cell and gene therapy called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) therapy. TIL therapy expands the number of a patient’s immune system cells that successfully attacked the tumor. Scientists remove these tumor-infiltrating cells and multiply them into billions of strong and persistent cancer-fighting immune cells.
“My oncologist explained to me that we’re taking these cells and making more of them. They used the analogy of the video game Pac-Man. One Pac-Man character goes around eating the dots and cherries. Scientists were going to give me enough Pac-Man to outnumber the dots and cherries, and help my immune system eat them up quickly.” — Cancer survivor Chris White
In November 2019, Chris traveled to the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado – which was 1 of the 57 sites for this trial and the closest in proximity for him. There, he had his T cells removed.
The plan was to have his cells returned by Christmas. That did not happen.
Last patient in clinical trial.
In December, Chris learned his cancer had spread even further than he realized – to his brain. Unfortunately, untreated brain metastasis would exclude him from the clinical trial, and the study’s final infusion date was scheduled to be Jan. 15, 2020.
Time was running out.
Chris had less than two weeks to receive treatment for his brain metastasis, get another scan by Dec. 24 showing the treatment controlled the tumor on his brain, and get back to the hospital to receive his army of TILs. The window was so tight that doctors at Texas Oncology suggested hospice care as a precaution in case he didn’t get everything done in time.
Chris refused to give up, even as he prepared his will and other end-of-life affairs. The most difficult part of the process was receiving insurance approval for radiation therapy, which he finally received on Dec. 16. He scheduled a preparatory appointment for radiation the next day and received his five doses of radiation therapy from Dec. 18-23.
He received a scan on the last day prior to the trial closing from any re-entry, and on Jan. 3, 2020, a review of his scan showed that the radiation had controlled his brain metastasis.
It was enough for him to re-enroll in the clinical trial, and on Jan. 15 – the last possible day to receive the treatment – Chris became the last patient dosed and received his infusion of cells for TIL therapy as the registration-enabling Cohort 4 of the C-144-01 Melanoma Study with Lifileucel.
‘Everything was gone.’
Chris’ 6-week checkup was at the end of February. He wasn’t sure what to expect – especially after so many other treatments had failed – but remained hopeful that the TIL therapy had at least stopped the disease from spreading any further.
“I wanted to set the tone of all positivity and no negativity,” Chris says. “Not just for myself but for everyone in my circle.”
The positivity finally paid off. TIL therapy didn’t just stop Chris’ melanoma from spreading. His cells had the disease in retreat.
The scans at that appointment showed a 50-60% reduction of the cancer throughout his body. At the 9-month checkup in September 2020, doctors said he had a “complete metabolic response.” His scan in October only showed one “spot” that appeared to be cancer.
And in January 2021, one year after he received TIL therapy, his doctors told him the best news yet.
“Everything was gone,” Chris says. “The cancer was eradicated. I was cured!”
FDA approval of Amtagvi for melanoma.
The TIL therapy Chris received was called Lifileucel. In February 2024, four years after the trial ended, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved lifileucel to treat advanced melanoma as second-line therapy. It is manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Iovance and sold under the brand name Amtagvi.
The clinical trial Chris enrolled in was a major step in the approval process, granting access to TIL therapy for many people with advanced melanoma.
“Amtagvi is not just a newly approved therapy for melanoma but also the first advanced cell therapy approved for any solid tumor cancer, which is a gigantic leap in modern medicine considering that 90% of all cancers are solid tumors,” Chris says. “Clinical trials are out there and currently in progress everywhere. I know many people will never even hear of or know what mucosal melanoma is, but I’ll bet anything most people have heard of lung, breast and colon cancers that are more common and recognizable, and these are all solid tumors. This first approval for TIL opened the door for so much more. It changed history.”
Today, Chris is an advocate for using cell and gene therapies such as Amtagvi to treat cancer, especially as one of the first treatments patients try.
“If it works, it’s a one-time treatment that can defeat your cancer without this constant need for other, and more toxic, therapies,” Chris says. “If it doesn’t work, then you have the other tools in your treatment toolbox to try.”
Chris credits his survival – and the FDA approval of TIL therapy – to bold scientists willing to take chances and develop innovative therapies.
“If scientists didn’t take risks, then this particular science wouldn’t have gotten to where it is now,” Chris says. “We needed scientists to keep taking risks to bring the research to each next step.
“You don’t just go from the first floor to the 10th floor. You must go level by level in research. And this research must be funded. That’s where an organization like Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy comes in.”
