Research progress of PD-1/PD-L1 in small cell lung cancer / 中国肿瘤临床

ABSTRACT

Small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) has a high degree of malignancy and is characterized by strong invasiveness, rapid growth, and early metastasis. SCLC is sensitive to initial treatment with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but it can easily relapse and has a poor prognosis. Both programmed death-1 (PD-1) and programmed cell death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) antagonists activate the immune response of tumor cells by activating T cells, and have shown exciting curative effects in clinical studies of SCLC, thereby becoming powerful po-tential agents to treat SCLC in the future. This article aims to illustrate the progress of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors in the treatment of SCLC, as well as the role of PD-L1 expression and tumor mutation burden (TMB) as a biomarker in SCLC.