Introduction
Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide 1, and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for more than 80% of all lung cancers. Despite the existence of various treatment methods such as new chemotherapeutics and gene-targeted drugs, still patients with lung cancer have below 5-year survival rate and high mortality rate. In recent years, immunotherapy, especially PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint inhibitors, has achieved a great success in the clinical application of various tumors by inhibiting the PD-1/PD-L1 signaling pathway and activating the immune system. Therefore, it has fetched much attentions of the researchers recently.
However, existing clinical trials often exclude patients with viral infections (patients with hepatitis B, hepatitis C, syphilis, etc.), and the efficacy and safety of immunotherapy for such patients are still unclear. There is a high occurrence of hepatitis B in China and the current hepatitis B surface antigen carrying rate of people under 60 is 7.2% 2. There are about 93 million chronic HBV infections, of which more than 20 million are patients with active hepatitis B 3. The purpose of current investigation is to retrospectively analyze the efficacy and safety of PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitors for locally advanced and advanced NSCLC patients with chronic viral infection, to provide a reference for clinical decision-making.