Surprisingly, to our knowledge, the prognostic and clinicopathologic influence of overall CD3+ TILs and especially of CD3is has not yet been studied in ESCC, as the few, and rather loosely connected studies regarding TILs in ESCC rather focused their efforts on studying potential effects of the PD-1 / PD-L1 axis [21, 24] or overall CD8+ TILs [21]. The gene discussed is CD274; the disease is esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.