Leonardo Ramos Ferreira PhD

My goal is to control how the immune system recognizes self and non-self. This knowledge will allow us to reestablish immune tolerance in autoimmunity and organ transplant rejection, as well as to enhance immunity in cancer and persistent infections. I have the broad expertise and motivation necessary to successfully carry out this work. I am an Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and, by courtesy, of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and the Hollings Cancer Center. As a graduate student at Harvard University with professors Jack Strominger and Chad Cowan, I studied human pregnancy as a model of immune tolerance and uncovered an enhancer element regulating the expression of the nonclassical tolerance-inducing molecule HLA-G. I was also the first to report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in clinically relevant primary human cells – hematopoietic stem cells and CD4+ T cells – and generated hypoimmunogenic human pluripotent stem cells by combined CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene knockout and knock-in. As a postdoctoral scholar with professors Qizhi Tang and Jeffrey Bluestone at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), I created an anti-HLA-A2 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) and used CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene knock-in to replace the endogenous T cell receptor (TCR) gene with this CAR gene in primary human regulatory T cells (Tregs). The resulting CAR Tregs were suppressive specifically upon recognizing HLA-A2 in vitro and in humanized mice, and trafficked to transplanted HLA-A2+ human islets. My laboratory focuses on using engineered immune receptors to systematically study how specificity, affinity, and signaling modulate T cell function in autoimmunity and organ transplant rejection, as well as on using this knowledge to develop new cellular therapies.