As low tumoral phospho-ErbB3 levels and elevated CD8+ T-cell infiltrations are recently established events indicative of good patient survivals in HNSCC (Takikita et al, 2011; de Ruiter et al, 2017), our study first defined somatic MAPK pathway mutations as novel genomic events governing two outcome-favoring features in HNSCC. The gene discussed is CD8A; the disease is head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.