So-called extended criteria with numerous immune checkpoint inhibitors have exhibited an encouraging clinical benefit of more than 1-year survival in patients with programmed cell death 1 (PD-1)-positive tumours (Reck et al. 2020), although currently, complementary approaches to metastatic nonsquamous NSCLC treatment are still in development (West et al. 2019). Here, PDCD1 is linked to non-small cell lung carcinoma.