Sixth-Week Immune-Nutritional-Inflammatory Biomarkers: Can They Predict Clinical Outcomes in Patients with Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Treated with Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors?

Abstract

Background: We investigated the relationships between inflammatory markers such as the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR), Lung Immune Prognostic Index (LIPI), and modified Glasgow prognostic score (mGPS) to determine whether they could predict treatment response to pembrolizumab or nivolumab (immunotherapy) 6 weeks after the start of treatment (post-treatment). Methods: We included all patients with lung cancer treated with immunotherapy. We examined the biomarker trends and explored their associations with progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and response rate (RR) at 6 weeks. Results: Eighty-three patients were enrolled in the study. The presence of liver metastasis, low post-treatment NLR (p = 0.004) and PLRs ≥ 170 (p ≤ 0.001) were independent prognostic factors of shorter OS. A good LIPI status was associated with better PFS (p = 0.020) and OS (p = 0.065). Post-treatment mGPS (0–2) was significantly associated with improved PFS (p = 0.009) and OS (p = 0.064). Conclusions: Post-treatment NLR, PLR, LIPI, and mGPS are associated with worse OS and recurrence. These findings should be independently and prospectively validated in further studies.

Keywords

• immune-based prognostic scores
• neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR)
• platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR)
• Lung Immune Prognostic Index (LIPI)
• modified Glasgow prognostic score (mGPS)