So, penile squamous cell carcinoma is a rare but aggressive tumor with limited therapeutic options. We think that the five-year survival of patients with metastatic disease is around 10%. Interestingly, there’s limited prognostic biomarkers associated with penile squamous cell carcinoma because it’s an understudied rare disease. So we sought to determine the role of programmed death ligand 1 or PD-L1 in penile squamous cell carcinoma through a systematic review and meta-analysis...
So, penile squamous cell carcinoma is a rare but aggressive tumor with limited therapeutic options. We think that the five-year survival of patients with metastatic disease is around 10%. Interestingly, there’s limited prognostic biomarkers associated with penile squamous cell carcinoma because it’s an understudied rare disease. So we sought to determine the role of programmed death ligand 1 or PD-L1 in penile squamous cell carcinoma through a systematic review and meta-analysis. So we had the largest cohort to date with 15 studies and 1,445 patients assessing the expression of PD-L1 in patients with PSCC. So we first looked at survival outcomes, including overall survival and cancer-specific survival, and we saw that PD-L1 positivity was associated with 51% increased risk of death in general and 61% increased risk of cancer-related death. We also assessed the correlation of PD-L1 expression with clinical pathologic outcomes like lymph node metastasis. And we saw that there’s a three-fold increase in the risk of lymph node metastasis associated with PD-L1 positivity. Interestingly, we also found that PD-L1 was more often positive in tumors that have HPV-negative tumors. And overall, all the studies were all going in the right direction of PD-L1 expression association with worse overall prognostic outcomes. Our study did not assess predictive outcomes in terms of response to immunotherapy. We think that’s going to be the future direction for future studies to assess.
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