Fig. 6: Selected baseline stool proteins predict clinical and treatment outcomes in UC.

A Boxplots for stool Fibrinogen at baseline parsed by WK4 clinical outcome. WK4 Remission, WK4 Calprotectin-defined Remission, and WK4 PUCAI active disease show signfiicant association with fecal Fibrinogen at baseline (p < 0.05). B Boxplots for stool TIMP-2 at baseline parsed by WK4 Remission, WK4 Calprotectin-defined Remission, and WK12 CS-FREE Remission. C Boxplots for other significant associations. Shown are stool PGRP-S, TIMP-1, and MMP-12 proteins at baseline plotted against WK4 Calprotectin-defined Remission and WK12 CS-FREE Remission. In the boxplots, Y-axis shows log-transformed stool protein values at baseline and the X-axis shows the various clinical outcomes at subsequent follow-up time-points. In each boxplot, the middle line represents the mean value and the outer two-line bars represent the data range. The symbols outside the bar range indicate outliers. Shown p-values were calculated using two-sided Wilcoxon Test in R. D After adjusting for age, gender, ethnicity and medication use, a 3-marker panel comprised of stool Fibrinogen, TIMP-2, and Properdin measured at baseline best predict clinical remission at W4, with an accuracy of 0.71 (AUC = 0.72; 95% CI: 0.57–0.87), as determined using elastic-net regularized logistic regression. E A pairwise Pearson’s correlation was performed for the selected stool markers against conventional blood markers (Hemoglobin (HB), ESR (Erythrocyte sedimentation Rate), and Albumin (Alb) at WK4 or WK12. Correlations that are not significant (p > 0.05) are crossed out.