Fig 2: Preoperative serum levels between healthy volunteers and RCC patients. Preoperative serum levels of VEGF (A), B7‐H4 (B) and PD‐L1 (C) were higher in RCC patients than those in healthy volunteers, whereas those of PD‐1 (D) were not. The median value is the central line, the box is the interquartile range, the bars are the full range, and the points are the outliers. Bold circled P values were obtained by comparing the two groups with the Mann–Whitney U‐test.

Fig 3: The expression of PD-1 in kidney tissue of mice. The IHC of PD-1 was shown in control groups (A), sham groups (B) and IRI groups (C). Quantification is represented in panel (D). Data are expressed as mean ± standard deviation. Difference between IRI group and sham group was made using unpaired Student’s t-test for normally distributed data. Images, × 200; original scale bar, 100 μm. **p<0.01. ***p<0.001.

Fig 4: Relationship between serum B7 family molecules. Spearman rank correlation between the preoperative serum levels of VEGF and B7‐H4/PD‐L1 in all 171 cases (A and C) and in 83 metastatic (M1) cases at nephrectomy (B and D). The preoperative serum levels of B7‐H4 and PD‐1 were positively associated with those of VEGF in all case and in M1 cases.

Fig 5: The serum concentration of PD-1, PD-L1 and CTLA among the participants. (A) No significant difference was observed in the serum concentration of PD-1 between non-responders (NR) and responders (R), while the serum level of PD-L1 and CTLA4 were significantly higher in non-responders than that in responders. (B) There is no significant differences in serum level of PD-1 among the individuals with different genotype of rs2227982, while the patients with AA genotype of rs2890658 and rs3087243 exhibited higher serum concentrations of PD-L1 and CTLA, respectively. ****p < 0.0001.