Table 1.
Patient characteristics (N = 102).
Fig 1.
Algorithm-based chemoradioselection treatment protocol.
CCRT, concurrent chemoradiotherapy; CDDP, cisplatin; CBDCA, paraplatin; AUC, area under the curve; and PND, planned neck dissection.
Fig 2.
Representative pictures of anti-CD44v9-antibody immunostaining.
The staining intensity obtained in the basal cells of normal epithelium was used as a control (A). Tumor samples demonstrated strong (B), moderate (C), and weak (D) intensities relative to the control (A). Respective positive (E) and negative (F) stainings. Bar indicates 200 um.
Fig 3.
(A) Disease specific survival curves of all patients (n = 102) according to the chemoradioselection.
(B) Disease specific survival curves based on the CD44 v9 positivity of biopsy samples (n = 60) obtained from 30 chemoradioselected (CRS) patients and 30 non-chemoradioselected (N-CRS) patients. (C) Disease specific survival curves based on the CD44 v9 positivity of biopsy samples obtained from 30 N-CRS patients.
Fig 4.
(A) Disease specific survival curves based on the CD44 v9 positivity of surgically removed samples obtained from 72 non-chemoradioselected (N-CRS) patients.
(B) Diseasespecific survival curves of 30 N-CRS patients who had paired biopsy and surgically removed samples. The patients were divided into 2 groups according to their levels of CD44v9 expression before and after concurrent chemoradiotherapy.
Table 2.
HRs using univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazard model.
Fig 5.
Proposed roles of CD44v9-expressing CSC and non-CSC in the chemoradioselection.
(A) CD44v9-expressing non-CSCs are sensitive to CCRT. Intrinsic CD44v9-expressing CSCs (B) or CCRT-induced CD44v9-expressing CSCs (C) can survive CCRT. These CD44v9-expressing CSCs are considered to be highly invasive and metastatic. CSC, cancer stem cell; CCRT, concurrent chemoradiotherapy; CRS, chemoradioselected; and N-CRS, non-chemoradioselected.