The correlation of hub genes expression with IGHV status in external cohorts was consistent with the result obtained from WGCNA (Fig. 4, Table 2), in which the HELQ and EGR3 were overexpressed in M-CLL than that of U-CLL significantly, while ZNF667 and SOWAHC were under-expressed.. Here, EGR3 is linked to B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia.