Kawahara T, et al. - Researchers performed a quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) with paired normal and cancerous bladder cancer tissue to study programmed death-1 (PD-1)/programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) gene expression. They analyzed the mRNA expression of PD-1/PD-L1 by a qPCR using 58 pairs of normal and cancerous human bladder tissue specimens. No significant differences were found between normal and cancerous tissue in the expression of the PD-1 and PD-L1 genes, but compared to low-grade bladder cancer, PD-1 and PD-L1 were both more highly expressed in high-grade bladder cancer. Outcomes suggested that PD-1 and PD-L1 might be a new biomarker associated with the pathological grade of bladder cancer. According to the findings, PD-L1 might function as a mediator of stage progression in bladder cancer and STAT1-NFAT pathway might be linked with this function.