Treatment-Related Serious Adverse Events of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors in Clinical Trials: A Systematic Review

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (ICI) have been progressively used in cancer treatment and produced unique toxicity profiles. This systematic review aims to comprehend the patterns and occurrence of treatment-related adverse events (trAEs) based on ICI.PICOS/PRISMA methods were used to identify published English-language on PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus from 2015 to 2020. Published clinical trials on ICI monotherapy, combined ICIs, and ICI plus other treatment with tabulated data on grade≥3 trAEs were included. Odds ratio (OR), χ2 tests were used to analyze for effect size and associations.This review included 145 clinical trials involving 21786 patients. Grade 3-5 trAEs were more common with ICI when they were plused with other treatments compared with ICI monotherapy(54.3% versus 17.7%, 46.1%, p<0.05). Grade 3-5 trAEs were also more common with CTLA-4 mAbs compared with anti-PD-1 and anti-PD-L1 (34.2% versus 15.1%, 13.6%, p<0.05). Hyperthyroidism (OR 3.8, 95%CI 1.7-8.6), nausea (OR 3.7, 95%CI 2.5-5.3), diarrhea (OR 2.7, 95%CI 2.2-3.2), colitis (OR 3.4, 95%CI 2.7-4.3), ALT increase (OR 4.9, 95%CI 3.9-6.1), AST increase (OR 3.8, 95%CI 3.0-4.9), pruritus (OR 2.4, 95%CI 1.5-3.9), rash (OR 2.8, 95%CI 2.1-3.8), fatigue (OR 2.8, 95%CI 2.2-3.7), decreased appetite (OR 2.4, 95%CI 1.5-3.8), and hypophysitis (OR 2.0, 95%CI 1.2-3.3) were more frequent with combined ICIs. Diarrhea (OR 8.1, 95%CI 6.4-10.3), colitis (OR 12.2, 95%CI 8.7-17.1), ALT increase (OR 5.1, 95%CI 3.5-7.4), AST increase (OR 4.2, 95%CI 2.8-6.3), pruritus (OR 4.1, 95%CI 2.0-8.4), rash (OR 4.4, 95%CI 2.9-6.8), hypophysitis (OR 12.1, 95%CI 6.3-23.4) were more common with CTLA-4 mAbs; whereas pneumonitis (OR 4.7, 95% CI 2.1-10.3) were more frequent with PD-1 mAbs.Different immune checkpoint inhibitors are associated with different treatment-related adverse events profiles. A comprehensive data in this systematic review will provide comprehensive information for clinicians.