Dr. Kotecha’s career goals are to “improve the treatment and medical care for patients with advanced kidney cancers through the development of biomarker-directed strategies and novel therapeutics.” Having assembled a mentorship team consisting of Dr. Robert Motzer and Dr. Ari Hakimi (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Dr. Kotecha has proposed to study the potential of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) subtyping and genetic diversity as a biomarker to predict patient response to immunotherapy. HLA proteins are generally categorized into Class I and II, and are important in presenting tumor neoantigens, or biomolecules unique to tumor cells, to the host immune system to recognize as unnatural, attack, and remove. Recently, HLA Class I diversity has been shown to be associated with patient response to immunotherapy. In this project, Dr. Kotecha has proposed to evaluate the type and diversity of the HLA Class II proteins, as well as kidney cancer specific tumor neoantigens uniquely presented by the HLA proteins, as predictive indicators of patient response to immunotherapy. The anticipated results from the proposed study have high potential to be rapidly translated into clinical practice, as HLA subtyping is already routinely performed for patients in need of organ transplants to find donor matches. The establishment of a reliable biomarker to predict response to immunotherapy, prior to treatment, would impact treatment decision, helping to ensure more favorable outcomes in kidney cancer.