Dr. Leonardo M. R. Ferreira The Medical University of South Carolina, USA

Leonardo M.R. Ferreira, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Pharmacology and Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina designing and developing engineered immune cell therapies for autoimmune disease, cancer, and aging.... read more

Prof. Ferreira obtained a B.Sc. in biochemistry at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he studied cancer metabolism in the laboratory of Prof. Ana Urbano. He obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in the laboratories of Prof. Jack Strominger and Prof. Chad Cowan, where he was the first to report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in human T cells and hematopoietic stem cells, helped creating hypoimmune pluripotent stem cells, and discovered a new enhancer element controlling a gene key to immune tolerance in pregnancy. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco in the laboratories of Prof. Qizhi Tang and Prof. Jeffrey Bluestone, where he developed chimeric antigen receptor regulatory T cells (CAR Tregs) to prevent graft-vs-host disease and protect pancreatic islet transplants from immune rejection.

His laboratory is dissecting CAR signaling in Tregs and developing ways to protect stem cell-derived tissues from immune rejection. Prof. Ferreira is also the founder and CEO of Torpedo Bio Inc., a startup company developing a novel engineered immune cell therapy to eradicate solid tumors.