Establishment of a Comprehensive Evaluation System for the Efficacy of Immunologic Checkpoint Inhibitors in the Treatment of Advanced Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Inhibitors of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) and programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) are effective therapies for metastatic NSCLC lacking sensitizing EGFR or ALK mutations. First-line combination regimens that include a PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitor may maximize the chance of response and lead to prolonged survival. PD-L1 expression is the only validated predictive biomarker for selecting pembrolizumab treatment. However, it is far from being the ideal biomarker and its role in predicting efficacy from ICPIs remains undefined due to conflicting results from randomized clinical trials. The selection of patients most likely to benefit from immunotherapy is crucial in order to avoid exposure to potentially toxic and ineffective drugs as well as to prevent inappropriate allocation of health resources. Further studies are clearly needed to better understand the mechanism of action of immunotherapy in vivo thus allowing the identification of other predictive biomarkers. Therefore, our research team intends to explore advanced non-small cell lung cancer treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors, by combining the evaluation criteria of solid tumor efficacy evaluation criteria (RECIST1.1), clinical pathological characteristics of patients, and dynamic monitoring of peripheral blood molecular biological markers, finding the correlation with the efficacy of immunotherapy, establish a detection mode for selecting patients with clinical benefits.