Novel mechanism of immune evasion involving PD-L1 in various cancers

In their editorial, skillfully summarizing major recent findings in the relevant field, Chae’s et al. (1) have made insightful remarks on our article, which demonstrated a unique genetic mechanism for cancer immune evasion through aberrant PD-L1 expression caused by 3'-UTR disruption (2). Initially identified through integrated genetic analysis of adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATL, 27% of cases) (3), the mechanism was found to operate in a wide variety of common cancer types, including 8% of diffuse large B-cell lymphomas and 2% of stomach adenocarcinomas (2).