Fig. 3

Clinical outcome of CRC patients stratified on the basis of VEGF-A and TRF2 levels. a and b Progression/ Disease Free Survival evaluated by Kaplan–Meier curves on the panel of 185 CRC patients retrospectively evaluated in our institute. a Patients were stratified on the basis of VEGF-A and TRF2 expression and survival was evaluated in patients’ subgroups with all the possible combinations of VEGF-A/TRF2 levels: VEGF-A high/ TRF2 high (VEGF-A^H/TRF2^H), VEGF-A high/ TRF2 low (VEGF-A^H/TRF2^L), VEGF-A low/ TRF2 high (VEGF-A^L/TRF2^H), VEGF-A low/ TRF2 low (VEGF-A^L/TRF2^L). b Patients were stratified as in (a) and survival was evaluated by comparing patients expressing high levels of VEGF-A and TRF2 (VEGF-A^H/TRF2^H) with all the others patients’ subgroups (others). For each sub-population, the number of patients is reported in the brackets. Percentages of surviving patients are reported close to the respective curves. c Progression-free survival (PFS) and d Disease Specific Survival evaluated by Kaplan–Meier curves on CRC patients from the TCGA dataset. Survival of patients, stratified on the basis of TRF2 and VEGF-A mRNA expression, was evaluated as in (b)