The Association of Immunotherapy With the Overall Survival of Inoperable Stage III Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Patients Who Do Not Receive Chemoradiation

Abstract

Immunotherapy has been approved for stage III nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) as consolidation therapy after chemoradiation in patients whose disease does not progress after chemoradiation. However, many patients do not receive chemoradiation due to either the drugs' side effects or poor performance status. This study's objective is to investigate the association of immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy or Radiotherapy (RT) with the overall survival (OS) of stage III NSCLC patients who do not receive chemoradiation. Patients with stage III NSCLC who received either chemotherapy or RT with or without immunotherapy were identified from NCDB. The Cox proportional hazard regression analysis was implied to assess the effect of immunotherapy on survival after adjusting the model for age at diagnosis, race, sex, education, treatment facility type, insurance status, comorbidity score, histology year of diagnosis, and treatment types, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy. The final analysis included 32,328 patients, among whom 3,205 (9.9%) received immunotherapy. In the multivariable analysis adjusted for all the factors previously mentioned, immunotherapy was associated with significantly improved OS (HR: 0.76, CI: 0.71-0.81) compared with no immunotherapy. Treatment with chemotherapy plus immunotherapy was significantly associated with improved OS (HR: 0.83, CI: 0.77-0.90) compared with chemotherapy without immunotherapy. Further, RT plus immunotherapy was associated with significantly improved OS (HR: 0.62, CI: 0.54-0.70) compared with RT alone. In this comprehensive analysis, the addition of immunotherapy to chemotherapy or radiotherapy was associated with improved OS compared with chemotherapy or radiation therapy without immunotherapy in stage III NSCLC patients.

Immunotherapy combined with rh-endostatin improved clinical outcomes over immunotherapy plus chemotherapy for second-line treatment of advanced NSCLC

“…Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), which interact with the anti-programmed death-1 (PD-1)/programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) axis to reactivate the immune response, have emerged as a novel therapeutic option in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) ( 1 ). Even though ICIs therapy as a first-line and second-line treatment has been found to produce superior tumor remissions for NSCLC, a significant number of patients do not benefit from such approaches alone ( 2 , 3 ). To address this issue, ICI-based combination therapies were developed after several clinical studies were undertaken to investigate the efficiency of the combination regimen of ICIs.…”