of these conventional anticancer drugs is their inability to distinguish between cancer cells and proliferating normal cells and therefore, leading to severe side-effects and dose limitations. Moreover, cancer cells can develop resistance to these drugs that is mediated by the overexpression of multidrugresistance proteins that pump the drugs out of cells and thus render the drugs ineffective [1]. Recently, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs, also termed host defense peptides) have been shown to exert potent antitumor effects both in vitro and in vivo and received attention as new class anticancer molecules [2?]. These peptides have several advantages over currently.L number of outliers, which may result 1516647 from the limit of published language. Third, with limited data information, our study was not able to control for heterogeneity of EGFR status in testing the treatment effect of different medications. However, literature shows that bevacizumab is an anti-VEGF mAb with a high affinity for VEGF [47]; therefore the treatment effect would not differ from the EGFR status of patients. In addition, when gefitinib was used, patients with EGFR mutated were found to have better treatment effects than those with unknown EGFR status (composed of both patients with EGFR mutation and those without EGFR mutation) [15,34]. Given the fact that we found better treatment effect of bevacizumab comparing to gefitinib for patients with unkonwn EGFR status, we believe bevacizumab should show better treatment effect than gefitinib for patients without EGFR mutation. Our study included clinical trials with only slightly different enrollment criteria and patient demographics. However patient characteristics (age, gender, ECOG performance status) were found not to be balanced between groups in a small number of trials. Such patient level difference may lead to heterogeneity in the meta-analysis. We carefully included aggregated patient characteristics into our meta regression level to control for heterogeneity in our study. Inconsistency of chemotherapies of the control group did exist in this analysis, which could not be eliminated due to the study background. Further analysis with Bayesian method might solve this problem [48]. Finally, the clinical trials collected in this study show high heterogeneity. Due to the relative small sample size, our analysis may not be considered as strong evidence of treatment effect as other meta-analysis although we controlled for patient characteristics as well as study design. A large RCT(s) or individual-patient data meta-analysis may be needed in the future to further examine the treatment difference. In conclusion, we found from this meta-analysis study that for ?chemotherapy-naive patients, the advantage of bevacizumab in HROS is mainly due to the elevation of ORR and prolongation of PFS. In addition, compared with other targeted drugs mentioned, chemotherapy with bevacizumab significantly improved patients’ ?response rate, PFS and OS, especially for chemotherapy-naive patients.Supporting InformationTable S1 PRISMA Checklist.(DOC)Author ContributionsConceived and designed the experiments: JLC NQZ. Performed the experiments: JLC MZ. Analyzed the data: JLC NQZ. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: NQZ. Wrote the paper: JLC TSL XYC.
drugs ineffective [1]. Recently, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs, also termed host defense peptides) have been shown to exert potent antitumor effects both in vitro and in vivo and received attention as new class anticancer molecules [2?]. These peptides have several advantages over currently.