Fig. 4: Alteration of intracellular pSTAT3 responses by MP.

a Immune cell atlas depicting differences of the phospho-(p)STAT3 response (arcsinh ratio) between the control (n = 30 patients) and MP (n = 28 patients) group at 1, 6, and 24 h after surgery relative to the preoperative time point. Blue/red cluster colors indicate increased/decreased signaling in the MP group, respectively (two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum test). Arrows point at cell clusters that differ most significantly between the patient groups. In cell clusters of the adaptive compartment (contoured in green), MP treatment resulted in a sustained attenuation of pSTAT3 responses in CD4⁺T cells (first in Tbet⁺CD4⁺T cells at 1 h, then in CD4⁺ T_naive and CD4⁺ T_mem cells at 6 and 24 h. In contrast, in clusters of the innate compartment (contoured in orange) MP treatment resulted in no significant changes in the pSTAT3 signal in monocyte subsets (including cMCs, intMCs, and M-MDSCs) and in only a modest increase in the pSTAT3 signal in CD56^loCD16⁺NK cells at 1 and 6 h and ncMCs at 24 h. b, c Box plots depict the pSTAT3 signal in manually gated immune cell subsets corroborating observations contained in the immune atlas. b MP’s attenuation of the pSTAT3 signal was most pronounced in CD4⁺ T cell subsets. c MP does not attenuate the pSTAT3 signal in neutrophils (signal is increased at 24 h) or cMCs. All boxplots show median values, interquartile range, whiskers of 1.5 times interquartile range (two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum test, *p < 0.01, **p < 0.001, ***p < 0.0001). Exact p-values are available in Supplementary Table 2.