Additionally, the “No stable gene” and “Skewed ranks” methods identified signatures relating to autophagy, hypoxia, angiogenesis, DNA damage repair, cell proliferation, as well as multiple cancer-related signalling pathways including PI3K/Akt, Notch, TGFβ, MAPK, and WNT, which had significantly higher singscores in non-responders (Additional file 3: Table S6, S8). Here, AKT1 is linked to cancer.