As only TRIM21 was significantly associated with poor disease-free survival in NPC and its expression level was negatively correlated with the transcript levels of genes associated with CD8+ T-cell infiltration and antitumour responses, such as CD8A, PRF1, GZMA, GZMB, IFNG and LCK (Supplementary Fig. 1b, c), we selected TRIM21 for further study. Here, IFNG is linked to nasopharyngeal carcinoma.