Rate My Professor Leonardo Ferreira

Leonardo M. R. Ferreira, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Immunology and, by courtesy, of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the Medical University of South Carolina and the Hollings Cancer Center. He earned a B.Sc. in biochemistry from the University of Coimbra in Portugal and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University. As a graduate student at Harvard with professors Jack Strominger and Chad Cowan, he studied human pregnancy as a model of immune tolerance and identified an enhancer element regulating HLA-G expression. He was also the first to report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in clinically relevant primary human cells, including hematopoietic stem cells and CD4+ T cells, and generated hypoimmunogenic human pluripotent stem cells through combined gene knockout and knock-in. Ferreira completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, with professors Qizhi Tang and Jeffrey Bluestone, where he developed an anti-HLA-A2 chimeric antigen receptor and used CRISPR/Cas9 to engineer primary human regulatory T cells (Tregs) for targeted suppression in transplant models.

Ferreira’s laboratory investigates how engineered immune receptors, particularly CARs, modulate the specificity, affinity, and signaling of T cell subsets in tolerance and immunity. His work aims to develop new cellular therapies for autoimmune diseases, organ transplant rejection, cancer, and aging. Key publications include a 2019 review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery on next-generation regulatory T cell therapy, a 2019 PNAS paper on hypoimmunogenic pluripotent stem cells, a 2024 Cell Reports article on combinatorial genetic engineering for immune protection of stem cell-derived beta cells, and a 2024 Molecular Therapy Methods & Clinical Development paper on high-affinity CAR signaling in human Tregs. He has received the MUSC College of Medicine Research Excellence Award and was a finalist in the MUSC Shark Tank competition. Ferreira holds appointments in the College of Medicine at MUSC.