Evidence mapPaperPMID 42399673Full record

ArticleNature medicine2026

Generalizable AI predicts immunotherapy outcomes across cancers and treatments.

Wanxiang Shen, Intae Moon, Thinh H Nguyen, Michelle M Li, Yepeng Huang, Nitya Nair, Daniel Marbach, Marinka Zitnik

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In one paragraph

Article in Nature medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

8 authors.

Wanxiang ShenDepartment of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7114-3664
Intae MoonDepartment of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Thinh H NguyenDivision of Immunology, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6660-6556
Michelle M LiDepartment of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0223-7485
Yepeng HuangDepartment of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Nitya NairRoche Pharma Research and Early Development, Oncology Early Clinical Development, Roche Innovation Center Basel, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Basel, Switzerland.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9524-9313
Daniel MarbachComputational Sciences Center of Excellence, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Basel, Switzerland. daniel.marbach.dm1@roche.com.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6686-9249
Marinka ZitnikDepartment of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. marinka@hms.harvard.edu.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8530-7228

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are a standard treatment across cancers, yet most patients do not respond, and existing biomarkers generalize poorly across tumor types and therapies. Here we present COMPASS, a pan-cancer foundation model that predicts immunotherapy response from bulk tumor transcriptomes using a concept bottleneck transformer. COMPASS encodes gene expression through 44 biologically grounded immune concepts representing immune cell states, tumor-microenvironment interaction and signaling pathways. Trained on 10,184 tumors across 33 cancer types, COMPASS achieves better average performance than 22 methods across 16 clinical cohorts spanning seven cancers and six ICIs, improving accuracy by 8.5% and area under the precision-recall curve by 15.7% on average across cohorts. COMPASS generalizes to cancer types and treatments not represented during fine-tuning and may inform indication selection and patient stratification. In survival analyses, patients classified by COMPASS as responders had longer overall survival (hazard ratio = 4.7, P < 0.0001). Personalized response maps connect gene expression to immune concepts, identifying programs associated with response and resistance; in immune-inflamed non-responders, COMPASS highlights programs including TGFβ signaling, endothelial exclusion, CD4

Indexed as

ImmunotherapyNeoplasmsBiomarkers, TumorGene Expression Regulation, NeoplasticHumansImmune Checkpoint InhibitorsSignal TransductionTranscriptomeTreatment OutcomeTumor MicroenvironmentBiomarkers, TumorImmune Checkpoint Inhibitors

Identifiers

What Socratic holds

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.