Annals of oncology : official journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology
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Immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) now represent the standard of care for several cancer types. In pre-clinical models, absence of an intact gut microbiome negatively impacted ICI efficacy and these findings permitted to unravel the importance of the commensal microbiota in immuno-oncology. ⋯ Controversy still remains, as ATB treatment might simply constitute a surrogate marker of unfit or immunodeficient patients. In this review, we summarize recent publications addressing the impact of the gut microbiome on ICI efficacy, discuss currently available data on the effect of ATB administered in different time-frames respect to ICI initiation, and finally, evoke the therapeutic implications of these findings.
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Multicenter Study
Outcomes to first-line pembrolizumab in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer and very high PD-L1 expression.
In non-small-cell lung cancers with programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression on ≥50% of tumor cells, first-line treatment with the PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab improves survival compared with platinum-doublet chemotherapy. Whether higher PD-L1 levels within the expression range of 50%-100% predict for even greater benefit to pembrolizumab is currently unknown. ⋯ Among patients with NSCLC and PD-L1 expression of ≥50% treated with first-line pembrolizumab, clinical outcomes are significantly improved in NSCLCs with a PD-L1 expression of ≥90%. These findings have implications for treatment selection as well as for clinical trial interpretation and design.