Professor Beth Shaz, MD, MBA, helped lead a study to advance efforts to make tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy more accessible to cancer patients. TIL therapy, which uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer, has shown promising results and is being tested in clinical trials for other cancers, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
Since the demand for TIL-based treatments is growing, Shaz and her colleagues are working to simplify and reduce the cost of the complex manufacturing process. The study, “Improving Lung Cancer Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocyte (TIL) Manufacturing,” was published in Cytotherapy on July 6, 2025. The findings demonstrate that traditional TIL production methods can be successfully streamlined into a more efficient and cost-effective process, while still meeting quality and regulatory standards.
In the study, TILs were grown from 35 tumor samples using an optimized approach that replaced traditional materials with more efficient alternatives, including T-cell specific media and activation nanobeads.
The new protocol reduced the cell culture time from up to seven weeks to just four, while still yielding an average of 200 billion TILs per sample. These immune cells were very effective at killing cancer cells from the same patient.
Importantly, the quality and quantity of TILs matched those produced by established methods, such as the Moffitt Cancer Center protocol, but with superior tumor-killing ability. The result is a powerful, tumor-targeting cell therapy produced in quantities that are suitable for clinical use, bringing TIL-based treatments one step closer to broader patient access. Read the study abstract here.