Updates are available Correction dated 2019-09-23

Article History

Received: 21 March 2019

Revised: 10 July 2019

Accepted: 18 July 2019

First Online: 7 August 2019

Change Date: 23 September 2019

Change Type: Correction

Change Details: An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Competing interests

: M.N. is a director of Room 4 who own the rights to immunopath, an image analysis program used in this study to assess T-cell counts. D.K. is an employee of, and owns stock in Oxford Cancer Biomarkers, and has received research grants from Roche, and Merck and personal fees from Bayer, Incyte, Medscape, Oxford Cancer Biomarkers, OxOnc, and ASCO. The remaining authors declared no competing interests.

: Ethical approval for patient recruitment and sample collection in the VICTOR and QUASAR2 trials was approved centrally and at all recruiting centres. Ethical approval for anonymised tumour molecular analysis was granted by Oxfordshire Research Ethics Committee B (Approval No 05/Q1605/66). Approval from the Regional South Eastern Health Authorities of Norway for including molecular and clinical data of the Oslo series in international collaborative studies (1.2005.1629; 2010/1805)

: Funding for this study was provided by: Cancer Research UK (C6199/A10417 and C399/A2291), the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/207- 2013) grant 258236 collaborative project SYSCOL, European Research Council project EVOCAN, the Oxford Cancer Centre, the Oxford NIHR Comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), and core funding to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics from the Wellcome Trust (090532/Z/09/Z). M.G. is funded by a Wellcome Trust Clinical Training Fellowship. D.N.C. is funded by a Health Foundation/Academy of Medical Sciences Clinician Scientist Fellowship. A.S. is funded by a Norwegian Cancer Society Scientist Fellowship (no. 6824048-2016). R.A.L. is supported by the Research Council of Norway (no. 250993) and the Norwegian Cancer Society (no. 182759-2016). M.N. and D.O. were supported by Cancer Research UK and the National Institute for Health Research through the UCL Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (to D.O.) and UCL Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre (to M.N.). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, the Department of Health or the Wellcome Trust. The costs of open access publishing were funded by The Wellcome Trust (090532/Z/09/Z). The study funders had no role in the design, analysis, interpretation, or manuscript preparation for this biomarker study. D.N.C. had full access to all study data and had final responsibility for submission of this report.

: The datasets pertaining to VICTOR and QUASAR2 used during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The datasets used to validate our findings are available from the GEO database and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) (ExternalRef removed; ExternalRef removed).