Locoregional adoptive immunotherapy resulted in regression in distant metastases of a recurrent esophageal cancer.

Esophageal cancer is one of the most common malignant diseases. However, postoperative recurrences are still resistant to currently available radiochemotherapy. We recently reported a study on the initial clinical efficacy of locoregional adoptive immunotherapy for advanced esophageal cancer. We report here our clinical experience of remarked responses in distant metastatic lesions in a patient with recurrent cancer after receiving this immunotherapy. A male patient underwent curative surgery, and presented with multiple recurrent metastases in the supraclavicular lymph nodes (LNs), liver, and abdominal aortic LNs. Autologous tumor-activated lymphocytes (AuTLs) generated ex vivo were regionally injected into supraclavicular LNs every 2 weeks 13 times. Mean numbers of the administrated cells were 0.8 x 10(9) cells/injection. AuTLs established from peripheral blood lymphocytes stimulated by autologous tumor cells with interleukin-2 were tested for their cytotoxicity before every treatment. During immunotherapy, Grade 2 diarrhea and fever were observed. The clinical partial responses were obtained in all lesions and were sustained for 11 months. Because clinical toxicity was tolerable, this immunotherapy might be useful for patients with far-advanced esophageal cancers.