PD-L1 Expression in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Specimens: Association with Clinicopathological Factors and Molecular Alterations
, Karina Malmros 2, Ulrich Mager 3, Kajsa Ericson Lindquist 2,4, Kim Hejny 1, Benjamin Holmgren 1, Tomas Seidal 1, Annika Dejmek 5, Katalin Dobra 6,7, Maria Planck 8,9 and Hans Brunnström 2,4Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors describe a study on PD-L1 expression in bigger (non-paired) cohorts of patients with non-small cell lung cancer. A total of 1381 specimens were used for pairwise Mann-Whitney U tests and multivariate regression analysis, 90 of which were cytological samples from patients who also had a biopsy analyzed for PD-L1, with complete data on sample type, tumor location, histopathological diagnosis, and mutation status.
Major Comments: -
- There are no details on metastases, death, or follow-up for either cohort. It will be interesting to see how PD-L1 expression correlates with metastasis and PD-L1 expression correlates with mutation status in terms of overall survival and metastasis-free survival.
- There are no figures illustrating the various immunoscoring levels of PD-L1 in various types of NSCLC.
- Authors must present all statistical analyses in the form of graphs or tables that are easily understood by the reader.
- In the M&M section, immunohistochemistry and sequencing should be presented in detail with appropriate subheadings.
Minor comment: - Authors must maintain a constant font size.
Author Response
Please see the attached file!
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors verify the expression of PDL1 and mutation load of KRAS and EGFR. In general the manuscript is well-written.
The major concern I have is that I wonder why authors did not perform correlation statistics between PDL1 and EGFR mutation status and PDL1 expression and KRAS. The authors should report correlation of coefficient statistics.
Second, this is a retrospective study, so could authors perform survival analysis with PDL1 expression in various cohorts.
Author Response
Please see the attached file!
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
No further comments
