Figure 2.

NK-cell phenotype at the time of imatinib discontinuation. Ficoll isolated fresh PB MNCs were analyzed with multicolor flow cytometry. NK cells were defined as CD3^-CD56⁺ lymphocytes. (a) Molecular relapse-free survival of imatinib treated patients at baseline based on the median proportion of CD56^bright NK cells. Log-rank test was used to analyze the statistical significance between the two groups. Hazard ratio is reported in Table 1. (b) Patients were dichotomized to low and high CD56^bright NK-cell groups according to ROC and the Youden index analyses (AUROC 0.6011; 95% CI: 0.4275–0.7748). 2.99% was used as a cutoff. Hazard ratio is reported in the Supplementary Table 2. (c) The proportion of CD56^dim cells of CD56+ NK cells in early (n=13), late (n=8) and non-relapsing (n=19) patients (d) The proportion of CD57+ NK cells. (e) The proportion of CD16+ NK cells. In c–e Box-and-whisker plots present 5–95 percentiles. One-way ANOVA was used for comparison between multiple groups (exact P-value reported in the figure), and Bonferroni's post test was used to compare selected pairs (only early relapse group was compared to other groups to avoid multiple comparisons). Statistically significant differences between the groups are marked with asterisk (*P<0.05, **P<0.01).