The recent studies have evaluated the relationship between BRCA1 expression and clinical outcome of chemotherapy (mainly focused on platinum-based and toxal-based treatment) in NSCLC patients, but the results were inconclusive and controversial. Our aim of this study was to evaluate this association by literature based system review and meta-analysis.PubMed, EMBASE and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases were used to retrieve the relevant articles. The interested outcome included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS) and event-free survival (EFS). The pooled odds ratio (OR) or hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) ware estimated.After specific inclusion and exclusion criteria, 23 studies fulfilled the criteria and were included in our analysis. In 17 platinum-based studies, low/negative BRCA1 was in favor of better ORR (OR=1.70, 95%CI=1.32-2.18), longer OS and EFS (HR=1.58, 95%CI=1.27-1.97, and HR=1.60, 95%CI=1.07-2.39 for OS and EFS, respectively). In 4 toxal-based chemotherapy studies, the patients with high/positive BRCA1 had better ORR (OR=0.41, 95%CI=0.26-0.64), OS and EFS were not evaluated as the insufficient data available.Overall, BRCA1 might be a useful biomarker to predict clinical outcome for personal chemotherapy in NSCLC patients in the future.