Is Treatment Response Prognostic in Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer?

Correlations between treatment response and survival in patients with advanced non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have been unclear. Now, investigators have conducted a meta-analysis of 14 randomized, controlled trials of targeted and standard NSCLC therapies to examine associations between overall response rate (ORR), progression-free survival (PFS), and overall survival (OS) in 12,567 NSCLC patients.

At the trial level, ORR was strongly correlated with PFS (R² =0.89), but no association was found between ORR and OS or between PFS and OS. At the patient-level, responders had a better PFS and OS versus nonresponders (hazard ratio, 0.4 for both). It is suspected that ORR and PFS did not correlate to OS at the trial level because of crossover …