This concept has now been reawakened in line with clinical biomarkers and immunotherapy in cancer, with a seminal article dissecting the immunological characteristics of long-term survivors of pancreatic cancer in whom polyclonal, neoantigen-specific CD8+ T-cell responses along with a high load of neoantigens emerged as the quintessential determinant of protection against disease progression (Balachandran et al., 2017). This evidence concerns the gene CD8A and cancer.