Naiyer A. Rizvi

Naiyer A. Rizvi, MD, is the Price Family Professor of Medicine and Director of Thoracic Oncology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is one of the foundational scientists and clinicians who established tumor mutational burden (TMB) as the key genomic determinant of responsiveness to checkpoint immunotherapy in NSCLC. His landmark 2015 Science paper demonstrated that somatic mutation quantity in tumor DNA strongly correlates with clinical benefit from pembrolizumab in lung cancer, and that specific APOBEC-associated mutational signatures and tobacco carcinogen-driven transversions enrich for immunotherapy-responsive tumors. This work provided the intellectual scaffolding for subsequent large-scale prospective TMB validation studies across oncology. Rizvi was a co-investigator on the CheckMate 017 and CheckMate 057 trials that established nivolumab as the first approved PD-1 inhibitor for previously treated squamous and non-squamous NSCLC, respectively. His translational science program at Columbia has focused on neoantigen prediction from exome sequencing, T cell receptor repertoire dynamics during immunotherapy, and mechanisms of primary resistance in STK11-mutant and tobacco-naive lung cancers. Rizvi served as Chief of Thoracic Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering before joining Columbia, where he continues to train the next generation of immuno-oncologists and lead clinical development programs for novel checkpoint combinations in thoracic cancers.