Table 1.
Clinical characteristics of 227 patients with HCC.
Figure 1.
CXCL17 expression in situ in HCC tumors.
(A) Representative sites depicting CXCL17-producing cells stained brown in human chronic hepatitis liver, nontumor, peritumoral stroma, and intratumoral regions in HCC. Representative sites with low (upper panels) and high (lower panels) magnification were shown. Black arrows indicated CXCL17+ cells. (B) Multiple staining of MPO (green), CXCL17 (red), and DAPI (blue, nuclei) in paraffin-embedded sections analyzed by confocal microscopy. The coexistence of MPO and CXCL17 confirmed that a proportion of MPO+ neutrophils expressed CXCL17. White arrows indicated representative neutrophils expressed CXCL17. (C) Proportions of CXCL17+MPO+ cells in CXCL17+ cells or MPO+ cells of HCC tissue. Results are expressed as mean ± SEM (bars).
Figure 2.
Accumulation of CXCL17-producing cells predicted poor survival in HCC.
OS (top) and RFS (bottom) were estimated by the Kaplan-Meier method and compared using the log-rank test (n = 227).
Table 2.
Univariate and multivariate analyses of factors associated with survival and recurrence.
Table 3.
Association of CXCL17 with clinicopathological characteristics.
Figure 3.
Composition of immune infiltrates according to CXCL17 expression.
(A) Pie charts summarized the percentages of nontumor-infiltrating (N, left) and tumor-infiltrating (T, right) CD4, CD8, CD20, CD57, CD15, and CD68 cells in CXCL17low and CXCL17high groups. (B, C) Correlation coefficients between the density or percentage of CXCL17 and the density of each immune cell subset were shown.