The potential prognostic and predictive roles of programmed cell death protein 1 expressed by tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in solid tumors: a meta-analysis

Abstract

Aim: Several previous studies have evaluated the potential role of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) expressed by tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in various solid tumors and performed its prognosis role in patients’ survival with inconsistent results. This study aims to further systematically evaluate the association of PD-1 by TILs with clinicopathological parameters and clinical outcomes in solid tumor patients.

Methods: A comprehensive search was conducted in PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CNKI and Wanfang databases for relevant studies. The potential prognostic and predictive roles of PD-1 were assessed by pooled hazard ratio (HR), odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI). A total of 1863 patients were selected for in-depth analysis.

Results: The results demonstrated that PD-1 by TILs was correlated to overall survival for ovarian cancer (HR = 0.40, 95% CI: 0.26-0.61, P < 0.00001). Higher PD-1 expression was associated with lymph node metastasis (OR = 2.55, 95% CI: 1.22-5.29, P = 0.01) and tumor grade (OR = 3.08, 95% CI: 2.07-4.57, P < 0.00001).

Conclusion: The prognostic role of PD-1 by TILs is variant in different tumor types, which highlights the role of PD-1 by TILs as a potential predictive and prognostic biomarker and the development of strategies against the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would be a promising therapeutic target for some solid tumors.

Keywords

Programmed cell death protein 1 / meta-analysis / solid tumors / prognosis

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