Fig. 1: The pan-cancer landscape of tumour hypoxia.

We quantified tumour hypoxia in 1188 independent tumours spanning 27 different cancer types. a Hypoxia scores for 27 types of cancer, based on the Buffa mRNA abundance signature. Cancer types are sorted by the median hypoxia score (horizontal black line) for each cancer type. Each dot represents one tumour. Sample sizes for each cancer type are listed near the bottom along with the percent of tumours that have elevated hypoxia (hypoxia score > 0). The variability in hypoxia within cancer types was measured by the interquartile range (IQR), shown along the bottom. The IQR was particularly high in biliary adenocarcinoma (IQR = 43.0; Biliary-AdenoCA), lymphoid B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas (IQR = 36.0; Lymph-BNHL), lung adenocarcinoma (IQR = 34.0; Lung-AdenoCA) and breast adenocarcinoma (IQR = 32; Breast-AdenoCA). By contrast, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (IQR = 2.0; Lymph-CLL) and thyroid adenocarcinoma (IQR = 11.0; Thy-AdenoCA) showed less variance in hypoxia score. b Analysis of hypoxia between 16 comparable cancer types in PCAWG and TCGA (Spearman’s ρ, AS89). Dots represent the mean of the scaled median hypoxia scores from three different mRNA-based hypoxia signatures. Error bars represent the standard deviation of the scaled median hypoxia scores. Overall, the pan-cancer quantification of hypoxia between the PCAWG and TCGA datasets shows strong agreement.