CD8A and melanoma: Due to the limited sample sizes in publicly available datasets of melanoma patients treated with BRAF/MEKi, we turned to broader transcriptomic datasets of primary and metastatic melanoma using TIDE (Tumor Immune Dysfunction and Exclusion), a computational framework developed to infer immune cell infiltration and dysfunction from gene expression profiles.[24] TIDE defines cytotoxic lymphocytes (CTLs) primarily as CD8+ T cells.