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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A Ludwig Cancer Research study shows that ovarian cancer, which has proved resistant to currently available immunotherapies, could be susceptible to personalized immunotherapy. Led by Ludwig Lausanne investigator Alexandre Harari and George Coukos, director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Lausanne, the study shows that ovarian tumors harbor highly reactive killer T cells -- which kill infected and cancerous cells -- and demonstrates how they can be identified and selectively grown for use in personalized, cell-based immunotherapies.

"Tumors whose cells tend to be highly mutated, like those of melanoma and lung cancer, are the ones that respond best to immunotherapies," says Harari. "It has long been a question whether we'd even be able to detect sufficiently mutation-reactive T cells in patients with tumors that have low mutational loads."

[...] To get around this problem, researchers have been developing sophisticated methods to extract T cells from patients, select and expand those that best target a patient's cancer and reinfuse them into the patient. These approaches usually rely on T cells extracted from the bloodstream, not those already inside the tumor, which are referred to as TILs (for tumor infiltrating lymphocytes).

Journal Reference: Sara Bobisse, Raphael Genolet, et al. Sensitive and frequent identification of high avidity neo-epitope specific CD8 T cells in immunotherapy-naive ovarian cancer. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03301-0

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