Immunotherapy Master Trial for Advanced Cancers

Over the past decade, cancer immunotherapy has profoundly transformed oncology by harnessing the patient's immune system to target tumors. These therapies have demonstrated the potential for durable responses and, in some cases, long-term remission or cure. However, despite these advances, only approximately 20-30% of patients derive significant clinical benefit from current immunotherapies. In parallel, investment in oncology drug development continues to grow, with global spending projected to reach $307 billion by 2026. Yet, the overall failure rate in oncology drug development remains extremely high, at around 95%, highlighting a critical gap between scientific innovation and clinical success. One major contributor to these failures lies in traditional drug development and regulatory paradigms, which have historically relied on cancer histology as the primary framework for patient selection and treatment evaluation. This approach is based on the flawed assumption that tumors of the same histological type share similar biological behavior and therapeutic vulnerabilities, and that localized and advanced disease are biologically comparable. In reality, tumor biology-rather than histology-plays a decisive role in determining immunotherapy efficacy. Substantial heterogeneity exists within the same cancer type, leading to widely variable patient outcomes even among individuals receiving identical treatments. The recent emergence of tumor-agnostic approvals for immunotherapies has reinforced the importance of shared biological features across cancer types. Approvals of anti-PD-1 therapies for microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H), mismatch repair-deficient (dMMR), or tumor mutational burden-high (TMB-H) cancers have demonstrated that biological characteristics can transcend tissue of origin. However, the predictive value of current companion diagnostic assays remains limited. Only 30-40% of biomarker-positive patients respond to treatment, underscoring the inadequa