To determine the prognostic value of MICA/B expression in BC, 80 BC patients at the early stages of disease (TNM stages I and II) were divided into two groups according to the median value of MICA or MICB mRNA expression. Kaplan–Meier survival analysis was performed to evaluate the relationship between MICA or MICB expression and patient survival. The results indicated that patients with high expression of MICB had a longer overall survival compared with those with low expression of MICB. However, the results showed no significant difference in the overall survival between the two groups with different MICA expression (Figure 1d). Importantly, we found similar results in the early-stage BC cohort from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA, TNM stages I and II) (N=855) with a long-term follow-up period (up to 20 years) (Figure 1e). Similar results were obtained if we included advanced-stage BC patients in the calculation above (Supplementary Figure 1c and 1d). Taken together, these results suggest that MICB might act as an important predictive factor in BC.