Figure 2. Immune-inhibitory gene expression and overall survival of HCC patients in TCGA.

The Kaplan-Meier plots were made using KM Plotter,⁽⁵¹⁾ with 364 HCC patients’ RNA-seq data from the TCGA-LIHC project. The detailed method was described previously.⁽⁵²⁾ In brief, for each gene examined, all patients were divided into high- and low-expression groups by all possible cutoff values based on RNAseq data. The best performing results were shown here. Log-rank p-values were calculated and a p-value of 0.05 were considered as significant. For the six immuno-inhibitory genes examined, low expression of CD276 (encoding B7-H3) showed modestly but significantly better survival than the high-expression group. However, low expression of PDCD1 (encoding PD-1) had worse prognosis than the high-expression group. No correlations were found between expression and survival for the other genes examined.