Prognostic and clinicopathological value of PD-L1 in colorectal cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Purpose: The prognostic role of programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) in colorectal cancer remains unclear. We employed a meta-analysis to explore the prognostic value of PD-L1 and to ascertain the relationship between PD-L1 expression and clinicopathological characteristics in CRC patients. Methods: We systematically searched PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library until October 2018. Eligible studies about colorectal cancer that pay attention to PD-L1 expression and studies reporting survival information were included. In order to evaluate the prognostic role of PD-L1 for overall survival (OS) and recurrence-free survival (RFS)/disease-free survival (DFS), Hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) was used. Odds ratio (OR) with 95% CI was selected to appraise the correlation between PD-L1 with clinicopathological characteristics of colorectal cancer patients. Begg’s funnel plot was used to assess publication bias. Results: Twelve studies involving 4344 patients published from 2013 to 2018 were included in this meta-analysis. Pooled results revealed that PD-L1 overexpression was relevant to shorter OS (HR 1.47, 95% CI =1.01–2.15, p=0.04) and shorter RFS/DFS (HR 1.47, 95% CI =1.01–2.15, p=0.04). Moreover, Patients with high expression of PD-L1 associated with inferior tumor stage (OR=0.57, 95% CI: 0.45, 0.74, p<0.0001) and Vascular invasion-negativity (OR=0.75, 95% CI: 0.6, 0.94, p=0.01). But the expression of PD-L1 is not related to age, sex, tumor location, tumor differentiation, pT stage, pN stage, MSI/MMR status. Conclusion: This meta-analysis revealed that PD-L1 can serve as a significant biomarker for negative prognosis and the adverse clinicopathological features of colorectal cancer and could facilitate the better management of individual patients.