Veganzones et al. (2015) reported that approximately 90% of HPV-negative HNSCC tumors exhibited low expression of DKN2AC, mainly due to gmutations, loss of heterozygosity, and hyper-methylation of the gene promoter (Veganzones et al., 2015). In addition, CDKN2A loss-of-function in patients with non-small cell lung cancer had inferior OS when treated with immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) when compared to wild-type patients (Gutiontov et al., 2021). The gene discussed is CDKN2A; the disease is head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.