Figure 1.

Signaling pathways involved in head and neck cancer. The main pathways contributing to signaling in head and neck cancer, that is, NOTCH, RAS, AKT, TGF-β and STAT, are depicted in an abstract manner including only most relevant cellular components in this context. Activation is induced via binding of ligands to extracellular receptor parts, resulting in intracellular phosphorylation cascades leading to transcription of certain gene sets (numbers correspond to gene set sizes in Fertig et al. [20]) related to individual transcription factors or whole pathways (total number of targets quoted in brackets).