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Fangping Ren,1,* Tian Zhao,2,* Bing Liu,3 Lei Pan11Department of Respiratory, Beijing Shijitan Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100038, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Clinical Laboratory, The 161st Hospital of PLA, Wuhan, 430010, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Disease Control and Prevention, PLA Rocket Force Characteristic Medical Center, Beijing, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workPurpose: The aim of this study was to identify the prognostic value of blood neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio (NLR) in patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who received immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy.Materials and methods: 147 advanced NSCLC patients were enrolled in this study from June 30, 2013, to August 30, 2017. Survival analysis used the Kaplan and Meier methodology. The mean follow-up time was 2.6 years. The phenotypic T cells subtypes were evaluated by flow cytometry.Results: Of these patients, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves analysis were used to confirm the cut-off value, and patients were stratified into NLR>2.5 (n=88) and NLR≤2.5 (n=59) groups. Survival analysis showed that patients with NLR≤2.5 had significantly favorable overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) compared with patients with NLR>2.5. After stratified with the tumor mutational burden (TMB), we further found that patients with NLR≤2.5 had significantly favorable OS and PFS compared with patients with NLR>2.5 in the group of patients with TMB>10, while in group patients with TMB≤10, patients with NLR≤2.5 had no significantly favorable OS and PFS compared with patients with NLR>2.5. The CD3+and CD8+/CD28+T cell subsets were significantly increased in patients with NLR≤2.5 (P