Immunotherapy versus standard chemotherapy for treatment of extensive-stage small-cell lung cancer: a systematic review.

Lay abstract In the past decades, therapy of small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) has maintained the status quo in that etoposide, in combination with platinum-based chemotherapy, is still the first-line treatment for SCLC. Despite cancer cells being very sensitive to standard chemotherapy, relapse rates and prognosis are poor, especially in extensive-stage small-cell lung carcinoma (ES-SCLC). It is meaningful that immune checkpoint inhibitors have led to a promising transformation of treatment models for ES-SCLC. We searched the related literature systematically and performed a meta-analysis of several clinical trials to compare chemotherapy's therapeutic efficacy with immunotherapy. We found that immune checkpoint inhibitors achieve great improvement in survival indexes of ES-SCLC patients compared with standard chemotherapy.