Unlocking STING’s potential
Our scientists are excited about the potential of these new molecules but acknowledge this is early research and many years away from becoming an approved treatment. The molecules in this paper have not yet been tested in patients and are not approved for use by any regulatory authority.
“We’ll keep studying STING activators as potential cancer treatments. The next step for us will be to move into human safety studies of the molecules, which we expect to start in 2019. The biology of STING is really interesting, so we are also exploring the effects of switching STING on as a way of boosting response to vaccines and how switching STING off could be a potential treatment route for some autoimmune diseases such as Lupus,” Joshi added.
This is an exciting early example of our approach to R&D at GSK – using the best data to drive decisions and following the science to discover genuinely different and potentially important new medicines for patients.