Professor Kim Ho-guen’s research team at the Pathology Lab of the Yonsei Medical School and BK21 medical science project discovered a new mechanism that represses the translation of mutated incomplete proteins which are generated from genes in which nonsense mutation has occurred. This research was funded by the Proteomics Technology Project of the Ministry of Science and Technology, a part of their 21st Century Frontier R&D Program, and was published in the April 24 issue of a prestigious international journal of biotechnology, “PLoS Biology” (a biology journal published by the Public Library of Science). A new metabolic pathway called NMTR (nonsense-mediated translational repression) was identified. This mechanism is different from NMD (nonsense-mediated mRNA decay) , which was already known to scientists. The team discovered that cancer cells use the NMTR mechanism to repress the generation of proteins particular to cancer which will be identified as antigens by the immune systems. This discovery is an important key to study the way in which cancer cells evade immune reactions, possibly making it possible to develop cancer immunity cures that target this NMTR mechanism in the future.