Background/Objectives: The aim of the study was to evaluate the real-world effectiveness of immunotherapy compared to chemotherapy in advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and assess molecular profiling patterns in a large Greek cohort. Methods: This was a retrospective study of patients with advanced NSCLC from three oncology centers. Clinical, pathological, and/or molecular data were collected from the patient medical records. The primary endpoint was overall survival (OS). Results: Overall, 684 patients with advanced NSCLC were included; median age 67 years (range, 33 to 89). More than half of the patients (406, 59.4%) had been diagnosed with de novo metastatic disease. Overall, 289 of 684 (42.3%) patients underwent tumor molecular profiling. Immunotherapy use, with or without chemotherapy, in the first-line setting increased significantly over time (p < 0.001). Among 610 patients eligible for outcome analysis, immunotherapy at any line of treatment was associated with increased OS compared to chemotherapy alone (17.5 vs. 8.6 months; HR: 0.51, 95% CI: 0.42, 0.61; p < 0.001). The results remained consistent with the primary analysis as well as the landmark analysis using a 3-month cutoff to account for the immortal-time bias. Furthermore, time to next treatment (TTNT) was significantly longer with immunotherapy use in both first- and second-line treatment (TTNT1: 10.0 vs. 6.8 months, HR: 0.45, 95% CI: 0.34, 0.58; p < 0.001; TTNT2: 6.7 vs. 5.9 months, HR: 0.59, 95% CI: 0.40, 0.87; p = 0.009). Immunotherapy use remained an independent predictor of improved survival (HR: 0.50, 95% CI: 0.40, 0.63; p < 0.001). Conclusions: Immunotherapy, with or without chemotherapy, significantly improved clinical outcomes compared to chemotherapy alone in a real-world cohort of patients with advanced NSCLC. While molecular testing rates increased significantly over the study, only a minority of patients underwent PD-L1 testing, while broad molecular profiling was also incomplete, limiting the interpretation of treatment effects. Improvements to guarantee the universal molecular testing of patients with NSCLC are warranted.
Katsarolis et al. (Tue,) studied this question.