The relationship between blood-based tumor mutation burden level and efficacy of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors in advanced non-small cell lung cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: The predictive role of blood-based tumor mutation burden (bTMB) for selecting advanced nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients who might benefit from immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) is still under debate. Therefore, the purpose of this meta-analysis was to evaluate the efficacy of programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) /programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitors versus that of standard-of-care therapy in patients with NSCLC who were bTMB high and bTMB low. METHODS: PubMed, Embase, Cochrane, the Web of Science, and ClinicalTrials.gov were searched systematically from inception to February 2021 for studies of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors (durvalumab OR atezolizumab OR avelumab OR pembrolizumab OR Nivolumab) that provided hazard ratios (HRs) for overall survival (OS) or progression-free survival (PFS), or odds ratios (ORs) for objective response rate (ORR) in both bTMB high and bTMB low groups. RESULTS: A total of 2338 patients with advanced or metastatic NSCLC from six randomized controlled trials, which all used chemotherapy (CT) as a control, were included in this study. Compared with CT, PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor therapy improved OS (HR 0.62, 95% CI 0.52–0.75, P < 0.01), PFS (HR 0.57, 95% CI 0.48–0.67, P < 0.01), and ORR (OR 2.69, 95% CI 1.84–3.93, P < 0.01) in bTMB-high NSCLC patients but not in bTMB-low patients (OS HR 0.86, 95% CI 0.69–1.07, P = 0.17; PFS HR 1.00, 95% CI 0.78–1.27, P = 0.98; ORR OR 0.63, 95% CI 0.49–0.80, P = 0.03). Subgroup analyses showed that these results were consistent across all subgroups (line of therapy, therapy regimen, type of NGS panel, PD-L1 expression, and cutoff value). Meta-regression analysis showed that the proportion of patients with squamous cell histology had no statistical effect on clinical outcomes. Sensitivity analyses illustrated that all results were stable. CONCLUSIONS: The efficacy of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor therapy in advanced NSCLC patients may be dependent on bTMB level. Patients with high bTMB tend to obtain significantly better OS, PFS, and ORR from PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor therapy than from CT. However, because of multiple limitations, including those related to reproducibility, the results are exploratory and should be interpreted with caution. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12885-021-08924-z.