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CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY

Strengthening the sting of immunotherapy

Nature Reviews Immunology volume 20, page 589 (2020)Cite this article

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Cancer immunotherapies — such as immune checkpoint inhibitors — have elicited durable clinical responses, but a major subset of patients with cancer do not respond. Intensive efforts are therefore focused on identifying additional immune pathways that may be modulated to enhance the efficacy of existing immunotherapies. Writing in Science, two papers now report the development of novel systemic agonists of stimulator of interferon genes (STING) that safely and effectively boost antitumour immunity in mouse cancer models.

Therefore, to discover novel STING agonists, Chin et al. carried out a cGAS–STING pathway-targeted cell-based screen of 100,000 commercially available, structurally diverse drug-like small molecules, which led to the identification of a non-nucleotide STING agonist, named SR-717.

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References

Original articles

  • Chin, E. N. et al. Antitumor activity of a systemic STING-activating non-nucleotide cGAMP mimetic. Science 369, 993–999 (2020)

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  • Pan, B.-S. et al. An orally available non-nucleotide STING agonist with antitumor activity. Science 369, eaba6098 (2020)

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  1. Senior Editor, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery http://www.nature.com/nri/

    Sarah Crunkhorn

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  1. Sarah Crunkhorn
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Correspondence to Sarah Crunkhorn.

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Crunkhorn, S. Strengthening the sting of immunotherapy. Nat Rev Immunol 20, 589 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-020-00447-1

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