2025 ANZSA Sarcoma Research Grant Recipient - Cui Tu (Maxine)

Introducing Maxine, one of the two ANZSA sarcoma research grant recipients of 2025. Maxine has received funding from ANZSA to fund her project, evaluating:"First-in-field combinatorial therapy using anti-tumoral STING agonist to enhance chemotherapy effectiveness for hard-to-cure rhabdomyosarcomas."

Maxine early-career cancer immunologist at the Frazer Institute, The University of Queensland (UQ), with a research focus on the tumor microenvironment (TME) in hard-to-treat childhood cancers. Her research employs advanced spatial transcriptomics and proteomics—technologies recently recognized as Methods of the Year by Nature Methods—to map the spatial organization and cellular interactions within the TME. By applying these tools, she aims to uncover novel mechanisms of therapeutic resistance, relapse, and immune evasion in pediatric tumors, ultimately identifying new opportunities for combination therapies, including immunotherapy.

About the project: 

Rhabdomyosarcoma is a rare and aggressive childhood cancer that affects soft tissues like muscles. Unfortunately, treatment for RMS has not changed significantly in over 40 years, and children still face harsh chemotherapy with limited options if the cancer returns.

One of the challenges is that these cancers tend to be a “cold” tumour, meaning it has unknown mechanisms that prevent immune cells that naturally fight the cancer to infiltrate and kill it’s cancer cells. Our research is exploring a new approach that could “heat up” these tumours and make them more responsive to treatment, and enhancing our own immunity to facilitate the cancer elimination. We have found that after chemotherapy, a protein called STING—which helps activate the immune system—is increased in these tumours.

By combining chemotherapy with an existing drug that activates STING, we’ve seen promising early results in the lab, including slowed tumour growth in preclinical models. With this grant, we aim to further test this combination treatment in clinically-relevant and representative models and understand exactly how it works.

Our goal is to lay the foundation for new, more effective treatments that could one day be used in clinical trials to improve outcomes for children with rhabdomyosarcoma.