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Iovance Biotherapeutics develops and sells personalized cell therapies that use a patient's own immune cells to fight cancer.
Iovance Biotherapeutics is a biotech company that turns a patient's own immune cells into a cancer drug. Its lead product, Amtagvi, is a treatment for advanced melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer. The company also sells Proleukin, a drug that helps those engineered cells grow and work once they are back inside the patient.
The way this works is unusual. There is no factory full of pills waiting on a shelf. For each patient, doctors remove a piece of tumor, ship it to Iovance, and the company isolates tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes — TILs, which are the immune cells that already recognize and attack the cancer. Iovance grows billions of those cells in a lab, then freezes and ships them back to the hospital, where they are infused into the patient. It is a medicine built one patient at a time, which makes it slow and expensive but also highly personal. Iovance made history in 2024 when the FDA approved Amtagvi as the first cell therapy of its kind for a solid tumor. The business earns money from hospitals and treatment centers that buy Amtagvi and Proleukin for their patients. The pitch to those doctors is simple: before this, patients with advanced melanoma who had failed other treatments had very few options. Iovance is also pushing these therapies into other cancers, which is where the real long-term prize sits. The big risk is competition. Moderna and Merck are working on personalized cancer vaccines, and other cell-therapy players are chasing similar ground.
Iovance has also been unprofitable while it builds out its manufacturing and commercial team, which is normal for a biotech rolling out its first big product. The company is headquartered in San Carlos, California, and its shares trade on the Nasdaq Global Market. The story to watch is whether it can scale a made-to-order cell therapy reliably and turn early approvals into steady, growing sales.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026