Relative efficacy of the different treatments compared to the reference treatments were assessed by network meta-analysis (NMA). Briefly, we systematically searched PubMed, Embase, ClinicalTrials.Gov, European Society for Medical Oncology, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and World Conference on Lung Cancer databases as of May 2022 (27 –31 ). Bayesian parametric survival NMA was used to synthesize survival data from eligible trials. Details of the eligibility criteria, search strategies are provided in Supplementary material 2. We conducted three NMAs in our study. For the NMA of first-line PFS, we estimated the time-varying hazard ratios (HRs) between the combination therapies N + C, P + C, T + C, CA + C, SI + C or SU + C and standard chemotherapy. Then, the expected survival curves for the combination therapies were derived by applying the HRs to the Kaplan-Meier survival curves for standard chemotherapy (reference treatment). The reference PFS curve for the first-line was derived from the CameL-sq, in which the final rate of the PFS was 5% (11 (link)). For this analysis, in the platinum- and paclitaxel-based chemotherapy regimens, cisplatin and carboplatin, and paclitaxell, gemcitabine, and docetaxel were not differentiated because their prices were similarly low and their survival outcomes were almost the same, and these drugs were used in similar capacities in common clinical practice (6 (link), 32 (link), 33 (link)). Similar to the first-line NMA, for the second-line NMAs of PFS and OS, we estimated the HRs between nivolumab, tislelizumab and docetaxel. The referred PFS and OS curves were extracted from the docetaxel in Checkmate-078 China (final rates of PFS and OS were < 3 and 5% for docetaxel) (23 (link), 24 (link)). We also considered natural mortality after the plateau at the end of the survival curves, which were extracted from China's 6th National Census (34 ). The original PFS and OS curves used in this study are presented in Supplementary material 2.
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