Figure 2

Interrogation of the NKI295 breast cancer microarray dataset for the clinical significance of the IFN signature shown in Figure1. (A) the IFN signature was able to divide the cohort into two groups; one consisting of 154 patients (high IFN expressers) and the second consisting of 141 patients (low IFN expressers). Bars at the bottom of the figure indicate various histopathological characteristics of the tumors/patients whose microarray data appear in the corresponding column. ‘Outcome’: red denotes recurrence, white denotes no recurrence. ‘Grade’ refers to the histological grade of the breast carcinoma: red is grade 3, pink is grade 2 and white is grade 1. ‘Lymph node’: red indicates that the patient has axillary lymph node dissemination of the breast carcinoma, whereas white is negative for lymph node dissemination. ‘HER2’: orange indicates that the patient’s carcinoma was positive for HER2 over-expression, and white indicates negativity. ‘ER’: green indicates estrogen positive disease and white indicates estrogen receptor negative disease. ‘Interferon’: red are patients who cluster in the interferon positive group and blue are patients who do not overexpress the interferon cluster of genes. ‘Wound’: red denotes patients who are positive for the wound response signature of Chang et al. [19] and blue are those that do not overexpress the wound response. (B) These two distinct groups had a significantly different outcome with the high expressers of IFN displaying a greater rate of recurrence than the low IFN expressers.