The Efficacy and Risk Profile of c-Met inhibitors in Non-small Cell Lung Cancer: a Meta-analysis

c-MET inhibitors are considered as a kind of novel drugs in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment. However, the results of different clinical studies involving c-MET inhibitors were not consistent. In this report, we performed Meta-analysis to investigate the beneficial and harmful effects of these drugs from 9 studies including 1611 patients in target drug groups and 1605 patients in control groups. As a result, patients in target drugs group had longer progression free survival (PFS) (HR 0.80, 95% CI 0.66–0.99, p = 0.04) but not overall survival (OS) than those in control group, especially in Asian (HR 0.57, 95% CI 0.42–0.76, p < 0.001), Non-squamous (HR 0.79, 95% CI 0.64–0.97, p = 0.03), Phase III (HR 0.66, 95% CI 0.50–0.86, p = 0.002), previous treated (HR 0.77, 95% CI 0.63–0.95, p = 0.01) and small molecular compounds subgroups (HR 0.62, 95% CI 0.50–0.78, p < 0.001). In addition, target drugs did not affect the objective response rate (ORR) but improved disease control rate (DCR) (RR 1.22, 95% CI 1.02–1.46, p = 0.03) of NSCLC patients. Our study first indicated that targeting c-MET therapies improved PFS and DCR in advanced or metastatic NSCLC patients, especially in previous treated Asian patients with adenocarcinoma.