CGAS and cancer: However, it has been reported that PARP inhibitors have the potential to initiate cGAS/STING-dependent type I IFN production in human cancer cells independent of their BRCA gene status (Shen et al. 2019), presumably due to the mitotic defects or increased replication stress caused by PARPi affecting replication fork speed (Maya-Mendoza et al. 2018; Slade 2019).