Updated review of perioperative treatment for non-small-cell lung cancer in the new era of immune checkpoint inhibitors: past, present, and future

Abstract

The perioperative treatments for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) should control both local and microscopic systemic disease, because the survival of patients with NSCLC who underwent surgical resection alone has been dismal except in stage IA patients. One way to improve surgical outcome is the administration of chemotherapy before or after the surgical procedure. During the last two decades, many clinical studies have focused on developing optimal adjuvant or neoadjuvant cisplatin-based chemotherapy regimens that can be combined with surgical treatment and/or radiotherapy. Based on the results of those clinical studies, multimodality therapy has been considered to be an appropriate treatment approach for locally advanced NSCLC patients. When nodal involvement is discovered postoperatively, adjuvant cisplatin-based chemotherapy has conferred an overall survival benefit. More recently, neoadjuvant and/or adjuvant use of immunotherapy adding to the cisplatin-based chemotherapy has been revealed to improve survival of the patients with locally advanced NSCLC in many large-scale clinical trials; although, optimal treatment strategies are still evolving.

Keywords: adjuvant therapy; immune checkpoint inhibitor; neoadjuvant therapy; non-small cell lung cancer.