Road to remission: New treatment for advanced melanoma gives patients hope

Rick Schneider is a family man — a husband and doting father to three girls. He's also an outdoorsman who loves to bike, hike and ski. There's no mountain he's not ready to climb.

But a few years back, he was hit with a new mountain to climb: cancer.

“I had had a mole removed that I had had my entire life,” Schneider said. “It had started to grow and become oddly shaped, and the doctor removed it, sent it away, and it came back as just a really light or early form of stage one skin cancer, melanoma.”

Schneider said what started as stage one melanoma morphed into stage four cancer and spread to his liver and eventually small intestine.

“To me, it felt like a death sentence the day I received it,” he said.

Since 2018, he's been in and out of the hospital with one treatment after another.

Schneider said he remembers one day in particular when hope was waning.

“I couldn't do anything. I couldn't go anywhere,” he said. “I was just lying on the bed, just completely exhausted, and in my mind, I'm thinking, ‘okay, is this what it feels like to die of cancer?’ Right?”

Then last year, after having tried everything else, Dr. Geoffrey Gibney of MedStar Georgetown University Hospital came along with a new idea: a chance for Schneider to not only treat, but possibly beat his cancer — and be the first person outside a clinical trial to use Tumor-Infiltrating-Lymphocyte therapy, otherwise known as TIL therapy.

“When you have cancer in your body, your immune system recognizes that it's foreign. And it does try to clear it…. Unfortunately, cancer can invade your immune system or there can be other flaws in the immune system where it just doesn't effectively clear it…” Gibney said. “But those immune cells can recognize the tumor. TIL therapy is taking advantage of that principle where you remove a tumor from a patient, and those immune cells that recognized and tried to kill off the tumor are laying dormant, and those cells are then manufactured in a laboratory to become the product that we then give to the patient.”

TIL therapy is FDA-approved as a second or third option for patients with advanced melanoma.

Gibney said in the future, the same treatment could be used to treat other diseases like head, neck and colorectal cancer.

Schneider underwent the procedure in October, a single infusion that changed the course of his life.

He admitted it was grueling, even for someone who’s physically fit. But two months later, he’s back out climbing the mountains he enjoys.

Gibney said his prognosis looks good.

"The hope is that he never needs future treatment, that his disease control and response goes on for the rest of his life,” Gibney said.

And for Schneider, he's back to work and back to the life he enjoys living.

“The way I feel is I feel like I don't have cancer,” Schneider said. “And when you have cancer, you feel it, you know?”