• The impact of antibiotics on the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) was evaluated in 23 studies including 2,208 patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) for Progression Free Survival (PFS) and 5,560 patients for Overall Survival (OS).
• The median OS was reduced on average by 6.7 months (95% confidence interval [CI]: 5.1–8.4) in patients exposed to antibiotics.
• The pooled hazard ratio was 1.47 (95% CI: 1.13–1.90) for PFS and 1.69 (95% CI: 1.25–2.29) for OS revealing a significantly reduced survival in patients with NSCLC exposed to antibiotics.
• The magnitude of the effect depended on the time window of exposure to antibiotics with stronger deleterious effects reported when the patients took antibiotics around the initiation of cancer treatment.
Paris (France), 9th of April, 2020 – Da Volterra, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative products to protect the intestinal microbiota from the damaging effects of antibiotics, today reports results from one of the first systematic reviews and meta-analyses on the impact of antibiotic use on immune checkpoint inhibitors’ efficacy in non-small-cell lung cancer patients. The study was published under the title “NSCLC Immunotherapy Efficacy and Antibiotic Use: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology (Impact Factor of 12.460 in 2018) and is available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtho.2020.03.002.
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