Table 1.
Main clinical characteristics of the patients included in the study.
Fig 1.
Identification of miRNAs related to treatment response.
A) Hierarchical cluster analysis showing the 8 miRNAs identified differentially expressed in TRG4 vs TRG0-1 samples in the screening phase. B) miR-21, C) miR-99b, D) miR-375 and E) let-7e expression levels in the whole cohort according treatment response (TRG). The black bars in the scatter plots indicate mean ± SEM, and in blue we have highlighted the values from the 12 samples included in the screening phase. TRG 0–3 group is composed of 70 patients, one TRG0, 14 TRG1, 14 TRG2 and 41 TRG3, while the TRG4 group is composed of 26 patients.
Fig 2.
(A) ROC curve analyses to evaluate the potential utility of miR-21, miR-99b, miR-375 and their combination to distinguish patients with maximum response to neoadjuvant treatment (TRG4) from others. (B) ROC curve analysis comparing the miRNA combination with pre-CRT clinical stage and CEA levels.
Fig 3.
Kaplan–Meier curves for (A) DFS according to let-7e expression, (B) OS according to let-7e expression, (C) DFS according to miR-328 expression, and (D) DFS according to miR-375 expression.
Fig 4.
Kaplan-Meier curve for DFS according to the miRNA combination (sum of expression of miR-21, miR-99b and miR-375).
Table 2.
Multivariate analysis for DFS and OS.