Jeffrey Chou

Senior Vice President,ClinicalScience
Iovance Biotherapeutics


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Dr. Chou joined Iovance in 2023 as Senior Vice President of Clinical Science and has supported activities leading to the accelerated approval of lifileucel (Amtagvi) for the treatment of melanoma in the United States. He is a physician scientist with over a decade of industry experience in immuno-oncology clinical drug development. Prior to Iovance, he was at Fate Therapeutics as Vice President of Clinical Development and oversaw a pipeline of genetically modified induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-based NK and T cell therapies for solid tumors. At Pfizer, he was a clinical lead working in the early phase on various immunotherapeutics including immune checkpoint, immune agonist and bispecific antibodies including elranatamab (Elrexfio). His industry career began at Amgen where he helped support the approval of talimogene laherparepvec (Imlygic) for melanoma. Prior to his industry experience, Dr. Chou was a faculty member at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where he had been conducting pre-clinical and translational research on T cell responses against colorectal cancer and had a clinical focus on gastrointestinal cancers. He received his medical oncology and internal medicine training at the University of Washington, M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, and B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Speech title & Synopsis

Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes: Advancing Cell Therapy for Solid Tumors

Solid tumor cancers are a leading cause of death worldwide, and there exists a large unmet need for improved therapies. Tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) therapy is a personalized treatment in which polyclonal T cells extracted from a patient’s tumor are expanded ex vivo to billions of reinvigorated cells and given back to the patient. These T cells can recognize a multitude of antigens within a tumor, which allows for killing of cancer cells. The first T cell therapy to be approved for solid tumors is lifileucel (Amtagvi), which is indicated for the treatment of unresectable or metastatic melanoma previously treated with anti-PD1 and if BRAF V600 mutation positive, a BRAF inhibitor with or without a MEK inhibitor in the United States. Additional clinical trial efforts are ongoing to evaluate the use of lifileucel in the front-line setting in combination with anti-PD1 as well as expand the use of lifileucel into other solid tumors beyond melanoma such as non-small cell lung cancer and endometrial cancer. Next generation approaches involving genetic modification of TIL may further enhance their anti-tumor activity over unmodified TIL.