Hossein Borghaei

Hossein Borghaei, DO, MS, is Chief of Thoracic Medical Oncology and holder of the E. Doris Caldwell Endowed Chair in Oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center. He is the principal investigator of the CheckMate 057 trial that established nivolumab as a second-line therapy for non-squamous NSCLC, the pivotal counterpart to CheckMate 017, and together these two trials underpinned the first FDA approvals for PD-1 inhibition in lung cancer. Borghaei subsequently led the CheckMate 227 trial, a complex multi-part phase III study evaluating nivolumab plus ipilimumab dual checkpoint blockade as first-line therapy for advanced NSCLC. CheckMate 227 demonstrated that nivolumab plus ipilimumab provides superior OS compared to chemotherapy in patients with TMB ≥10 mutations/megabase and in the unselected all-comers population regardless of PD-L1, leading to FDA approval of this doublet immunotherapy combination. His research has also addressed the clinical and translational implications of TMB testing from tissue biopsy and the differential outcomes observed in tobacco-associated versus tobacco-naive NSCLC with immunotherapy. Borghaei is an active contributor to NCCN guidelines for lung cancer and lectures widely on dual checkpoint blockade strategies, immune-related adverse event management, and biomarker-guided immunotherapy selection in thoracic malignancies.