In melanoma and non-small-cell lung cancer, immune checkpoint inhibitors like target programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1)/programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) and cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen-4 (CTLA-4) have been exploited and successfully applied in the clinic (Topalian et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2016; Huang et al., 2017), whereas many glioma patients are refractory to current immunotherapy, which arouses our interest in identifying additional immune checkpoints to enhance the therapeutic efficacy in glioma (Reardon et al., 2014; Huang et al., 2017). This evidence concerns the gene PDCD1 and central nervous system cancer.