Can Doctors Predict Who Immunotherapy Will Work For? City of Hope Aims to Find Out

Fewer than 40% of patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors, and many who do eventually develop resistance. For a disease this heterogeneous—where only a subset of patients carry a targetable mutation like EGFR, ALK, or ROS1—that gap has left oncologists without a reliable way to predict who will benefit from immunotherapy and who won't.

City of Hope has opened a national phase 2 clinical trial designed to change that. The study, IMMUNO-BIOMAP, is part of ARPA-H's Advanced Analysis for Precision Cancer Therapy (ADAPT) program, backed by an award of up to $23.7 million. City of Hope is the only institution in the country to receive ARPA-H funding for lung cancer research through ADAPT. The 6-year trial aims to enroll 535 newly diagnosed patients with metastatic NSCLC receiving first-line immunotherapy with or without chemotherapy.

In this video, Ravi Salgia, MD, PhD, thoracic medical oncologist and chair of Medical Oncology at City of Hope, walks through the clinical gap driving the trial and its biomarker-driven design. The study's co-primary objectives are to identify biomarkers that predict early treatment failure, evaluate cell-free DNA and ctDNA-guided strategies for treatment duration, and assess biomarker-specific treatment decisions against historical controls for second-line progression-free survival.

As Dr Salgia explains, the ultimate goal extends beyond just identifying who responds to immunotherapy but also using those insights to guide personalized, biomarker-directed treatment decisions in near real time, with the aim of extending progression-free and overall survival for the roughly 200,000 people diagnosed with lung cancer in the US each year.

The trial is enrolling at City of Hope sites across Southern California, as well as in Chicago, Atlanta, and Phoenix.

REFERENCE

City of Hope Opens National Lung Cancer Clinical Trial Seeking to Predict Immunotherapy Success. News release. City of Hope. July 21, 2026. Accessed August 6, 2026. https://tinyurl.com/33mwce43