Yan Lab
Principal Investigator: Nan Yan
Institution: The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas, TX)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
The cGAS-STING signaling pathway is a critical component of the innate immune system. This pathway not only detects viral infection and then mounts an antiviral response, but it also detects self-DNA and leads to autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases. Nearly all cGAS signaling requires STING and STING also induces disease independent of cGAS. This Program Project will harness the expertise of a highly interdisciplinary team of investigators who were involved in several of the milestone discoveries of STING biology to now develop STING inhibitors to treat human disease. This Project 1 will focus on immunology and mouse models. In this project, we will address three major limitations in the current state of STING biology and STING inhibitor development. One is the reliance of type I interferon (IFN-I) signaling as the only readout of STING activity. We and others have defined several IFN-independent functions of STING, and these activities could be either pathogenic or beneficial. Other limitations are shortage of STING-driven mouse disease models and lack of humanized STING mouse model that develop spontaneous disease. Our main hypothesis is that STING inhibitors targeting differ…
Active NIH Awards
- 1P01AI186772-01A1: Mechanisms of STING Antagonists in Cellular and Preclinical Mouse Models (2026)
- 1R21AI191016-01A1: Oligoadenylate synthetase (OAS) in intestinal immunity (2026)
- 1R21AG101600-01: STING regulation of Tau seeding and Tauopathy (2026)
- 5R01NS122825-05: Mechanism of STING-mediated Neuropathology in Niemann-Pick Disease (2025)
- 5R01NS117424-05: The Mitochondrion-STING Axis in An Early Childhood Onset Neurodegenerative Disease (2025)
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