Leonardo Ferreira, PhD

Leonardo M.R. Ferreira, PhD, is an assistant professor of pharmacology and immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina. The Ferreira Lab engineers immune receptors and regulatory T cells as living drugs for autoimmune disease, cancer, and aging. Originally from Coimbra, Portugal, he earned his PhD in biochemistry at Harvard and trained as a postdoctoral scholar in the UCSF laboratories of Qizhi Tang and Jeffrey Bluestone. He is an investigator in the NIH Human Islet Research Network CMAI consortium, dissecting chimeric antigen receptor function in human regulatory T cells to induce immune tolerance. In 2026 he was named a recipient of a Breakthrough T1D grant carrying one million dollars, leading collaborators across institutions to restore beta cell function without immunosuppressive drugs. His engineered Tregs are aimed at halting the autoimmune attack on beta cells and protecting transplanted islets.

Affiliation

Assistant Professor, Medical University of South Carolina

Location

Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.