Effect of Helicobacter pylori on immunotherapy is gaining more attention.

BACKGROUND

Immunotherapy, especially immune checkpoint inhibitors, has been widely used in tumor therapy and have shown ideal clinical efficacy. However, some cancers still do not respond to PD-1/PD-L1 blockade therapy effectively. Helicobacter pylori infection might affect the curative effect of immunotherapy while it is rarely reported. We aimed to visualize the research hotspots and trends of H. pylori and immunotherapy using a bibliometric analysis to help understand the future development of basic and clinical research.

METHODS

The relevant publications on H. pylori and immunotherapy were searched on April 20, 2022, in the Web of Science Core Collection Database (WOSCC). The document types were limited to articles and reviews. The VOSviewer 1.6.16 software was used to assess the co-authorship, co-occurrence, citation of countries, institutions, authors, journals, and hotspot keywords. The research status and trend change of H. pylori and immunotherapy were analyzed by bibliometric analysis.

RESULTS

A total of 95 studies authored by 561 researchers were eventually included in this study. The majority of the retrieved studies were 55 (58%) original research articles. China conducted the greatest number of studies, followed by USA and Italy. The related topics included the following three aspects: the relationship between microorganisms and cancer, the relationship between gastric cancer and immunity, and the relationship between H. pylori and immunotherapy, including purified/cloned components of H. pylori acting as efficient adjuvant to boost tumor responses and H. pylori infection which modulate host immune responses and impact on the efficacy of antitumor immunity initiated by immune checkpoint inhibitors. The timing diagram revealed that the current research hotspots focused on effects of microorganisms on immunotherapy.

CONCLUSION

The effect of H. pylori on cancer immunotherapy is getting more and more attention in these years. It still remains uncertain, and more studies are needed in the future.