Recently, several teams reported that independent of immune function, PD-L1 regulated cell growth, proliferation, apoptosis, autophagy, migration and invasion in various cancers including ovarian cancer, melanoma, and pancreatic cancer via modulating PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway (Clark et al., 2016; Zhao et al., 2017). The gene discussed is AKT1; the disease is melanoma.