Costimulatory molecules expressed in cancer cells, especially immune checkpoints, play a crucial role in regulating antitumor immune responses (Turley et al., 2015), and the results in this study show that multiple members of the B7-CD28 and TNF families are associated with risk scores, which may indicate a potential role they play in lymph node metastasis. Here, TNF is linked to metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes.