A new study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, has found that a greater presence of tumor lymphocytic infiltration (TLI) may be associated with a greater likelihood of survival in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell found in tumors that help to kill cancerous cells, have been associated with a favorable prognosis in a variety of different cancers. Using data from the LACE-Bio (Lung Adjuvant Cisplatin Evaluation Biomarker) clinical trials, which evaluated the benefit of platinum-based adjuvant chemotherapy in patients with NSCLC, researchers assessed the function of these cells in each patient, categorizing TLI as either intense or nonintense.
At the end of the study, complete data was available for 783 patients for the discovery set (median follow-up of 4.8 years) and 763 patients for the validation set (median follow-up of 6 years). In the discovery and validation sets, 11% of patients and 6% of patients, respectively, had intense TLI. In the discovery set, 5-year disease-free survival and 5-year overall survival were found to be significantly longer in patients with intense TLI than in patients with nonintense TLI. This trend was confirmed after similar analyses of the validation set Hazard ratios for overall survival and disease-free survival indicated significant risk reductions in both sets of patients associated with TLI intensity.
Elisabeth Brambilla, MD, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Albert Michallon (La Tronche, France), and coinvestigators concluded that TLI intensity, though found in a minority of tumors, could be a favorable prognostic indicator of survival for patients with NSCLC.
