Chris White of Melissa will stand on a stage in Philadelphia on Friday, Sept. 25, and tell a room of cancer researchers, biotech executives and patients the story of how he survived.
White is one of the patient "Warrior" emcees at the Emily Whitehead Foundation's 2026 Believe Ball, an annual gala for the cell and gene therapy field, the foundation said in announcing his role. His story is a rare one even in that room. In 2020 he was the last patient dosed in the clinical trial of a cell therapy that the Food and Drug Administration went on to approve in 2024.
Running out of options
White was 36 in July 2018 when he was diagnosed with anorectal mucosal melanoma, a rare form of melanoma that arises on the body's mucous membranes rather than on sun-exposed skin, according to the foundation and the patient stories he has told through the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy and the Melanoma Research Alliance. By the end of that year, scans showed the cancer had spread, making it stage IV.
Over the following months it reached his liver, lungs and the base of his neck. He had 20 lymph nodes removed, then radiation, then rounds of immunotherapy and chemotherapy. By the fall of 2019 he had exhausted the treatments available to him, and that November he enrolled in a clinical trial at the University of Colorado in Aurora for tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy, known as TIL.
The treatment takes immune cells from a patient's own tumor, multiplies them in a lab and infuses them back to attack the cancer, what the FDA calls a tumor-derived autologous T-cell therapy. White's own description, in his ACGT Foundation story: scientists "were going to give me enough Pac-Man to outnumber the dots."
Then, in December 2019, scans found a tumor in his brain, which disqualified him from the trial. He had targeted radiation to the brain in the days just before Christmas, cleared a follow-up scan by the trial's deadline, and was allowed back in. He received his cells on Jan. 15, 2020, the last day he could, and was the last patient dosed in the trial, according to the foundation and his published accounts.
Within weeks his tumors had shrunk by half. By September 2020 his scans showed a complete metabolic response, and in January 2021 his doctors told him the cancer was gone, according to his ACGT Foundation account. The foundation says he has remained cancer-free since.
"I describe mucosal melanoma as an assassin, slowly following me," White told the Melanoma Research Alliance in 2023. "So, when I heard the scan results, for the first time in forever, I felt free."
The trial that became a treatment
The therapy White received is lifileucel, now sold as Amtagvi. On Feb. 16, 2024, the FDA granted it accelerated approval for adults with melanoma that cannot be removed by surgery or has spread, and that has already been treated with a PD-1 blocking antibody and, when the tumor carries a BRAF mutation, a BRAF-targeted drug. The approval rested on the trial White was part of. The FDA called it the first approved T-cell immunotherapy derived from a patient's tumor. In the trial, 31.5 percent of the 73 patients treated at the approved dose saw their tumors shrink, according to the FDA's approval notice, a response rate rather than a cure rate.
White now works full time as an advocate. He founded Mucosal Melanoma Survivor LLC, self-published a book, "Killing Cancer with TILs," in 2024, and hosts a podcast, TIL Talks, about cell and gene therapies. His message to patients, in his own words to the Melanoma Research Alliance: "You can beat melanoma. Don't give up. There is a way."
