PIWIL1 and gastric cancer: In the same year, Haifan et al. explored the independent function of PIWIL1/HIWI in gastric cancer (Lin et al., 2020), and demonstrated that PIWIL1 recruits the NMD (nonsense-mediated mRNA decay) machinery, a cellular pathway that degrades aberrant or selective mRNAs to prevent harmful protein production, involving components like SMG1, UPF2, and UPF1.