On Jul. 29, 2024, a team led by the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute and the Wayne State University School of Medicine announced that since the first immunotherapy drug to boost the body’s immune response against advanced lung cancer was introduced in the U.S. in 2015, survival rates of patients with the disease have improved significantly. 

The researchers analyzed data from the National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database, which compiles cancer-related data covering approximately 48% of the U.S. population. The investigators’ analysis focused on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), which accounts for up to 90% of all cases of lung cancer and is the leading cause of cancer-related death among both men and women in the United States.

In a comparison of 100,995 patients with metastatic NSCLC treated in 2015–2020 (after immunotherapy was deemed the standard of care) with 90,807 patients with metastatic NSCLC in the pre-immunotherapy era of 2010–2014, patients in the immunotherapy era were less likely to die from any cause. The overall survival rates at one, three, and five years were 40.1% versus 33.5%, 17.8% versus 11.7%, and 10.7% versus 6.8%. The median overall survival was eight months in patients in the immunotherapy era and seven months in those in the pre-immunotherapy era. The study was published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.