Fig 1.
A schematic diagram depicting the analysis pipeline in our study.
Fig 2.
Representative photomicrographs showing MMP-9 expression of weak (A), moderate (B), and strong (C) intensity by immunohistochemical staining in invasive ductal carcinoma (original magnification, ×400).
Fig 3.
Expression of MMP-9 according to molecular subtype.
High MMP-9 expression was more frequently observed in the HER2 subtype than in the other subtypes, including luminal A, luminal B HER2-negative, luminal B HER2-positive, HER2-positive, and triple-negative subtype (p = 0.024).
Table 1.
Clinicopathological parameters of MMP-9 from our data and METABRIC data.
Table 2.
MMP-9 expression according to molecular subtype.
Fig 4.
Survival curves derived using the Kaplan–Meier method showing correlation with MMP-9.
(A) Disease-free survival, (B) overall survival, (C) overall survival in the METABRIC data (p = 0.001, 0.011, and 0.002, respectively).
Table 3.
Disease-free and overall survival analyses according to MMP-9 levels.
Fig 5.
Gene expression data analysed using gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) to extract biological information.
In each thumbnail, the green curve represents the evolution of the density of the genes identified in the RNA-seq. GSEA calculates these by walking down the ranked-ordered list of genes, increasing a running-sum statistic when a gene is in the gene set and decreasing it when it is not. (A) TNFRSF12A was found commonly in four gene sets (IL15_UP.V1_UP, MTOR_UP.V1_UP, IL2_UP.V1_UP and PKCA_DN.V1_DN) with high MMP-9 expression. (B) High TNFRSF12A was associated with poor prognosis in three independent cohorts (METABRIC, GSE1456, and GSE20685).
Table 4.
Gene sets related to high MMP-9 expression.