Van To

Dr Van To is an early-career postdoctoral researcher at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, where she moved from CAR-T cell engineering into translational cancer immunotherapy. She leads several immunology studies embedded in clinical trials combining radiotherapy with immune checkpoint blockade in solid tumours. Working with longitudinal blood and tumour samples from patients with renal cell carcinoma and non-small cell lung cancer, she maps the immune response using high-dimensional flow and mass cytometry, multiplex immunohistochemistry, TCR sequencing and transcriptomics. Her recent work identified pre-treatment immunosuppressive gene signatures in the tumour microenvironment that may explain why some patients fail to achieve durable responses (Nature Communications, 2026)."