First-line immunotherapy boosts survival in ever-smokers with NSCLC: study
Non-smokers, however, don't derive a comparable benefit, a cohort study suggests
In advanced non-small-cell lung cancer, the benefit of first-line treatment with the checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab may hinge on a patient's smoking history, US oncologists find.

Their study of 1166 patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with the programmed death-1 (PD-1) inhibitor found those who had ever smoked had longer overall survival compared with never-smokers.
“To our knowledge this is the first direct comparison suggesting that smoking status is predictive of overall survival after receiving first-line pembrolizumab