Patients’ characteristics
In this study, we considered 78 patients with chronic viral infection who were treated at Jiangsu Cancer Hospital with the PD-1 inhibitor alone or in combination with the chemotherapy and/or the bevacizumab therapy, and their clinical and pathological baseline characteristics are shown in Table 1. The median age of the 78 patients was 65 years, including 62 males and 16 females. Adenocarcinoma was the most common pathological type (56.4%), followed by squamous cell carcinoma (35.9%). Most of the patients (88.5%) were clinically diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Out of 78 patients, 60 were suffering from NSCLC with a history of hepatitis B (including 57 patients with past hepatitis B and 3 patients with chronic hepatitis B), 2 NSCLC patients had the record of hepatitis C, and 16 with syphilis. All patients received PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint inhibitors, including 10 patients were treated with monotherapy and 68 patients were prescribed with the combination chemotherapy/bevacizumab. Most of the patients (67.9%) received the PD-1 inhibitor-based therapy as second- or late-line therapy and most of the patients (87.2%) did not received combined radiotherapy. Most patients (85.9%) had an ECOG performance status of 0 or 1.