Fig. 3

a ERBB2 was significantly differentially expressed (DE) in whole blood from 5 non-treated patients with rheumatoid arthritis (nRA) and 12 healthy controls (HC) and for 7 treated patients with RA (tRA) versus 12 healthy controls (p = 0.04). The expression difference between nRA and HC was replicated in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) samples from an independent cohort of 46 nRA, 27 methotrexate-treated patients with RA and 34 HC (p = 0.033). b TP53 was differentially expressed in whole blood from 5 nRA and 7 tRA versus 12 HC (p = 0.02). There was a similar TP53 expression profile in PBMC samples from an independent cohort of 46 nRA, 27 methotrexate-treated patients with RA versus 34 HC (p = 0.05). c THOP1 was differentially expressed in whole blood from 5 nRA and 7 tRA versus 12 healthy controls (p = 0.001); there was a significant difference in expression between 27 tRA and 34 HC in PBMC samples (p = 0.02). A p value of 0.05 was used as the significance threshold for the Kruskal-Wallis (KW) non-parametric test. FPKM fragments per kilobase of transcript per million mapped reads