Fig. 5
Methylation Score Analysis and Its Association with ICI Treatment Response and Survival. A Comparison of the mean M-score (Y-axis) across the five genes: ABCB1, CHFR, HIST1H4F, ITGA4, and SPTBN1 in the baseline plasma-extracted cfDNA of patients (n = 67) prior to their treatment with ICIs. An ordinary one-way ANOVA was used to evaluate the differences between the three treatment response groups (X-axis): complete responders (n = 38), partial responders (PR) (n = 10), and non-responders (NR) (n = 19). Tukey’s multiple comparison test was applied post hoc to compare the mean of each group with the mean of every other group. Plotted are the mean ± SEM of the M-score values of each response group. The corresponding p-values are presented as numeric values. B Spearman’s rank correlation test was conducted to measure the relationship between the M-score of the baseline plasma-extracted cfDNA of patients (n = 67) prior to their treatment with ICIs and their overall survival (OS) (months). A Spearman’s correlation coefficient of r = − 0.3282, with a p-value of 0.0067, was obtained. C The determined M-score categories (Low/High) were plotted against the overall survival (OS) (months) of patients (n = 67) treated with ICIs. Patients who were still alive at the study endpoint are censored—depicted by tick marks on their respective lines. Outliers removed include those who died from other unrelated causes (n = 5) and samples collected following ICI treatment start date (n = 14). Statistical significance was determined using the Log-rank (Mantel-Cox) test, and a p-value of 0.001 was obtained. A number of patients at risk table below the Kaplan–Meier includes censored patients who are still alive but have reached the end of our observation period.
