Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that patients with high IL-6 level in the body had a shorter median survival than NSCLC patients with lower IL-6 level on the clinically critical 0–120-month window (Fig. 3c), suggesting that IL-6 is a short-to-medium term prognostic biomarker for NSCLC patients. Here, IL6 is linked to non-small cell lung carcinoma.