LGALS9 and cancer: To evidence the possibilities of the Gal-9/TIM-3 pathway for cancer immunotherapy, we also used bulk rna_seq data from the TCGA database for bioinformatics analysis, and the results shows that the expression level of LGALS9 (Gal-9) is much higher than immune checkpoints such as CD80/86 and CD274 (PD-L1) in the top type tumors (Supplementary Fig. 3) including TCGA-SKCM (malignant melanoma) as shown in Fig. 1d, meanwhile positive correlation with tumor size (Supplementary Fig. 4).