PLAU and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma: For most of the hub genes, our results showed that poor OS was associated only in those patients with high expression of SERPINE1 (p = 0.00054) or PLAU (p = 0.00289), as well as the low expression of ACTA1 (p = 0.04147), MYL1 (p = 0.01405), MYH2 (p = 0.04987) or MYLPF (p = 0.02122) (Fig. 4), suggesting that these candidate genes are associated with clinical outcome of HNSCC patients.