NUCLEATE Researchers Advance Understanding of Innate Immunity

How does the human immune system recognize molecular signals that indicate infection or cancer? A research team led by Prof. Carina C. de Oliveira Mann, Prof. Martin Zacharias and Prof. Roland Rad at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now uncovered key mechanisms by which the immune receptor STING (Stimulator of Interferon Genes) recognizes specific signaling molecules and initiates an immune response. The findings, published in iScience (Cell Press), provide important clues for the development of new cancer immunotherapies and improved vaccine technologies.

The study was conducted through a close collaboration between several research groups at TUM, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), and the Cluster of Excellence NUCLEATE. NUCLEATE brings together expertise from the life sciences, medicine, chemistry, physics, and computer science to better understand the functions of nucleic acids and develop new applications for medicine and biotechnology. This work demonstrates how fundamental insights into biological signaling pathways can pave the way for future therapeutic innovations.

Publication

STING agonist profiling by nucleotide library defines structural determinants of cyclic dinucleotide recognition, iScience (Cell Press), Indra Bekere, Yuliia Hubarzhevska, Sabrina V. Egender, Patrick K. Quoika, Rupert Öllinger, Marie Rose Schrimpf, Roland Rad, Martin Zacharias, Carina C. de Oliveira Mann, DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.11717
https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(26)02557-5