Clinical efficacy and safety of anti-PD-1/PD-L1 treatments in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

The present study was performed to investigate the efficacy and safety of anti-programmed death-1 (PD-1)/programmed death-ligand-1 (PD-L1) treatments in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The potential articles were searched from Pubmed and Embase. The end points included overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), objective response rate (ORR) and adverse events.  < .05 or  ≥ 50% meant obvious heterogeneity, and the random-effects model was adopted for pooled analysis, otherwise, the fixed-effects model was used. Subgroup analysis was performed based on the treatment line. Potential publication bias was tested with Begg's funnel plot. Eight eligible articles were included. OS rate of NSCLC patients was prolonged by anti-PD-1/PD-L1 treatments (HR = 0.685, 95%CI = 0.632-0.742), as well as PFS (HR = 0.821, 95%CI = 0.721-0.936). Meanwhile, anti-PD-1/PD-L1 treatments could greatly enhance the ORR (RR = 1.646, 95%CI = 1.382-1.961), with fewer adverse events (RR = 0.800, 95%CI = 0.688-0.931). Subgroup analysis indicated that anti-PD-1/PD-L1 treatments as second-line treatment could significantly improve the survival of patients without adverse events. The overall results were robust, without significant publication bias ( = .532). Anti-PD-1/PD-L1 treatments show better clinical efficacy and higher safety than chemotherapy in NSCLC.