PhD defence: Real-world outcomes of immunotherapy in lung cancer patients - Prompt evidence generation beyond clinical trials.

PLEASE NOTE: The candidate gives a layman's talk, therefore the livestream will start fifteen minutes earlier.

The introduction of immunotherapy has fundamentally changed the treatment of advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Whereas chemotherapy was previously the standard of care, immunotherapy has now become the cornerstone of treatment. Its efficacy has primarily been demonstrated in randomized clinical trials involving carefully selected, relatively young and fit patients. In routine clinical practice, however, patients are generally older and less fit, which may lead to different treatment outcomes. This highlights the importance of real-world evidence as a complement to clinical trial data. The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the effectiveness of immunotherapy in routine clinical practice and to develop methods for faster and more reliable analysis of real-world data.

The results of this thesis show that treatment outcomes of immunotherapy in patients with advanced NSCLC in routine clinical practice differ from those observed in clinical trials, highlighting the added value of real-world data as a complement to trial evidence. In addition, progression-free survival appears to be difficult and not always reliably measured in routine practice. New methods, such as automated analysis of medical records and advanced statistical models, enable faster and more accurate insights into how treatments perform in real-world settings and therefore provide a valuable addition to the existing knowledge on the effectiveness of immunotherapy.