Gene expression profiles from fresh-frozen biopsy sections of 46 tumours and normoxia- and hypoxia-treated cell lines were derived using Illumina bead arrays HT-12 v4 (Illumina Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) with ∼47 300 transcripts, as described by Halle et al (2012) (link). Total RNA was isolated using the RNeasy MiniKit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany). RNA quality control was performed with Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA, USA). cRNA was synthesised, labelled and hybridised to the arrays. Signal extraction and quantile normalisation were carried out using the software provided by the manufacturer (Illumina Inc.). Log-transformed data were used in all analyses. The data have been deposited to the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository (GSE55935).