To investigate the clinical relevance of our findings, we collected the tumor-related data from TCGA database, and found higher TIGIT gene expression in intratumoral region of HCC patients than in paratumor region (Supplementary Fig. 6) and a positive correlation between TIGIT and PDCD1 expression in HCC tumor tissue (Fig. 9a)49,50. Here, PDCD1 is linked to neoplasm.