Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The study aimed to conduct an in-depth analysis of the influence of PD-L1 status and expression levels and other variables on the effectiveness of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) in treating breast cancer. METHODS: A total of 19 articles, involving 16 trials and 7899 patients, were included in the analysis. The outcomes of interest were odds-ratio (OR) for pathological complete response (pCR) in early breast cancer, and hazard ratio (HR) for progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) in advanced breast cancer. RESULTS: In early breast cancer, individuals with PD-L1-positive tumors were more likely to benefit from ICIs than those with PD-L1-negative tumors. Furthermore, patients with PD-L1 positivity in immune cells (IC) had superior outcomes compared to those scoring positively on combined positive score (CPS), with ORs for ICIs benefit being 2.28 for IC-positive patients vs 1.78 for CPS-positive patients. Regarding the impact of breast cancer subtypes on the efficacy of ICIs, our findings indicated that triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) exhibits the greatest therapeutic response with OR of 1.93, followed by the hormone receptor-positive (HoR+) / human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative (HER2-), while the HER2+ was the worst. Additionally, age was identified as a key predictive factor in responding to ICIs. In advanced breast cancer, there was an upward trend in CPS values associated with enhanced ICIs responsiveness, with the predictive value increasing from 12% at a CPS threshold of 10 to 13.6% at 20. CONCLUSION: The study concluded that the PD-L1 expression scoring system effectively discriminates between patients with breast cancer in terms of the degree of benefit they may attain from ICIs. Patients with little or no PD-L1 expression experienced a diminished therapeutic benefit from ICIs.