What if the time of day you receive cancer treatment matters as much as the treatment itself? New research from China, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Medicine, suggests it might.
People with lung cancer who received immunotherapy in the morning lived significantly longer than those treated in the afternoon. Immunotherapy, given alone or combined with chemotherapy, is already an approved treatment for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) without driver mutations. This study was not about the discovery of a new drug. It focused on the timing of when patients received the treatment they were already prescribed.
What Were the Results of the LungTIME-C01 study?
Researchers studied 210 patients with advanced NSCLC. Half received immunochemotherapy before 3 PM (morning group). The other half were treated after 3 PM (afternoon group).
People treated in the morning had an average of 11.3 months before their cancer grew while those treated in the afternoon had their cancer grow around 5.7 months. Morning treatment also helped people live longer overall. People who received morning therapy lived an average of 28 months compared to 16.8 months in the group treated in the afternoon. Morning treatment nearly doubled the time before cancer progression and added almost a year of life on average.
In addition to better cancer control, the morning treatment group did not experience any additional side effects, suggesting the benefit of morning immunotherapy comes without additional risks to patients.
Why Does Morning Treatment Work Better?
Additional research is ongoing to understand these results. However, the researchers found that morning immunotherapy increased specific immune cells called CD8+ T cells, which are known to help the body fight cancer. People treated in the morning also had a better balance between “activated” and “exhausted” immune cells that could also be playing a role.
A Zero-Cost Measure with the Potential to Make Significant Impact
This discovery is extraordinary because this survival benefit costs nothing. People benefit without changing treatment or having additional appointments. It simply requires smarter scheduling.
Remarkably, the researchers found that people benefited from the timing of immunotherapy regardless of:
- Which specific immunotherapy drug was used
- Person’s age or gender
- How advanced the cancer was
- PD-L1 protein levels
It is important to note that the study is a single-center study that was conducted in China, so more research is needed to confirm these results in broader settings.
What This Means for You
If you have been diagnosed with advanced or metastatic NSCLC and biomarker testing results suggest that you are a candidate for receiving immunotherapy, it may be worth talking to your doctor about the benefits of morning infusions.
Study Reference: Huang Z, Zeng L, Ruan Z, et al. Time-of-day immunochemotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial. Nature Medicine. Published online 2026. doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04181-w