AKT1 and cancer: Beyond immune evasion, PD-L1 has intrinsic roles in cancer cells, including promoting tumor proliferation by activating the AKT/mTOR signaling pathway (Clark et al. 2017), contributing to cancer stemness (Almozyan et al. 2017; Gao et al. 2019), and facilitating metastasis by promoting EMT phenotypes (Chen et al. 2021; Jeong et al. 2024).