Elevated serum levels of vascular endothelial growth factor predict a poor prognosis of platinum-based chemotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer.

Aim: This study was designed to investigate the predictive and prognostic values of serum vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) level in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients treated with platinum-based chemotherapy.

Methods: Patients' peripheral blood samples were collected prior to chemotherapy and after 1 week of the third cycle of combination chemotherapy. Serum VEGF levels were evaluated through Luminex multiplex technique. Between September 2011 and August 2015, a total of 135 consecutive advanced or recurrent histologically verified NSCLC patients were enrolled in the study. Moreover, all the patients received platinum-based combination chemotherapy as a first-line treatment.

Results: No significant associations were found between pretreatment serum VEGF levels and clinical characteristics, such as sex (=0.0975), age (=0.2522), stage (=0.1407), lymph node metastasis (=0.6409), tumor location (=0.3520), differentiated degree (=0.5608), pathological (histological) type (=0.4885), and response to treatment (=0.9859). The VEGF load per platelet (VEGF) levels were not correlated with sex, age, primary tumor site, and pathological type in NSCLC patients (all >0.05). The median survival time of progression-free survival (PFS) was 6.407 and 5.29 months in the low and high groups, respectively, when using 280 pg/mL VEGF level as the cutoff point (=0.024).

Conclusion: In conclusion, the serum VEGF levels were found to be a poor prognostic biomarker for the efficacy of platinum-based chemotherapy in terms of PFS, but it was not shown to be a suitable predictive marker for clinical response to platinum-based chemotherapy.