# COMPASS AI Predicts Cancer Immunotherapy Response Across 33 Cancer Types

> A team at Harvard Medical School has released COMPASS, an AI model that predicts how patients will respond to cancer immunotherapy, and it works across an unusually broad 33 cancer types. In testing it improved accuracy by about 8.5 percent over existing approaches and outperformed 22 prior methods across 16 clinical cohorts, seven cancers, and six checkpoint inhibitor drugs. Technically it is a pan-cancer foundation model trained on more than 10,000 tumors from the Cancer Genome Atlas. Rather than being a pure black box, it uses what the researchers call a concept bottleneck transformer built around 44 biologically grounded immune concepts, so its predictions map onto real immune cell states and signaling patterns that clinicians can inspect. Just as important, the team shipped it openly. COMPASS is on GitHub under a permissive license and installs in a single command, and the work was published in Nature Medicine in early July. Immunotherapy helps only a fraction of patients and can carry serious side effects, so a tool that flags who is likely to benefit, in a form other labs can actually run and audit, is the kind of quiet, practical advance that adds up.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Medical Xpress · Published Friday, July 10, 2026_

## Wortins' read

A team at Harvard Medical School has released COMPASS, an AI model that predicts how patients will respond to cancer immunotherapy, and it works across an unusually broad 33 cancer types. In testing it improved accuracy by about 8.5 percent over existing approaches and outperformed 22 prior methods across 16 clinical cohorts, seven cancers, and six checkpoint inhibitor drugs. Technically it is a pan-cancer foundation model trained on more than 10,000 tumors from the Cancer Genome Atlas. Rather than being a pure black box, it uses what the researchers call a concept bottleneck transformer built around 44 biologically grounded immune concepts, so its predictions map onto real immune cell states and signaling patterns that clinicians can inspect. Just as important, the team shipped it openly. COMPASS is on GitHub under a permissive license and installs in a single command, and the work was published in Nature Medicine in early July. Immunotherapy helps only a fraction of patients and can carry serious side effects, so a tool that flags who is likely to benefit, in a form other labs can actually run and audit, is the kind of quiet, practical advance that adds up.

## Source

[Read the full story at Medical Xpress](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-07-ai-tool-cancer-immunotherapy-drugs.html)

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