Blockade strategies targeting the immune checkpoint genes CTLA4 (Topalian et al., 2016; Atkins and Tannir, 2018; Braun et al., 2021), TIGIT (Hong et al., 2018; Takamatsu et al., 2021), LAG3 (Klümper et al., 2020), and PDCD1 (Sunshine and Taube, 2015; Hayashi and Nakagawa, 2020) have long been or will soon be effective tools for the treatment of advanced ccRCC. Here, PDCD1 is linked to nonpapillary renal cell carcinoma.