During the acute HCV infection we found a slight trend of a reduction of the TIGIT/PD-1 frequency of HCV–specific CD4+ T cells of the patient group that developed a chronic HCV (n = 6) infection compared to patients who later spontaneously eliminated the virus (n = 4) (Fig. 3D), however this difference did not reach statistical significance (p = 0,0933) probably due to the small cohort size and larger cohorts are needed to investigate this question. This evidence concerns the gene CD4 and infection.