Today we’d like to introduce you to Leonardo Ferreira.
Hi Leonardo, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, you could tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am originally from Coimbra, Portugal. I always wanted to be a scientist and inventor as far as I can remember. As a kid, I was fascinated by how my knees would heal and regenerate whenever I hurt them. I was also particularly intrigued by a Brazilian soap opera I watched growing up, “The Clone,” where a scientist secretly cloned someone right before he died, and the clone (“Leo”) then went on to fall in love with the same woman as the original man (“Lucas”) did 20 years prior. In high school, I went to one of Coimbra’s public libraries and wandered into the college textbook section. There was a spark when I opened the biochemistry textbook on the page with the atomic structure of cellulose. It struck me that if we knew every biological molecule with the same level of detail as cellulose, we could improve medicine and the human condition. So, I majored in biochemistry in college at the University of Coimbra, Portugal; there, I had my first research experience growing human cells and quantifying their metabolism. It was also in college that there was a second spark when I picked up an advanced book on genetic engineering. If genes give instructions to cells and our bodies are made of cells, genetic engineering could be a way to know and control how our bodies work. Most of my textbooks in college in Portugal were American, and most of the scientific articles I read were from scientists in the United States, so I figured that’s where I should go to become a scientist and inventor. I took the summer before my last year in college to study for the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and applied to Ph.D. programs in the United States.
I started my Ph.D. at Harvard University in July of the following year. I was 20 years old. At Harvard, I was fortunate to have great mentors and make great friends. I worked on the immunology of pregnancy, gene regulation, pluripotent stem cells, and genome editing with the then-brand-new technique CRISPR/Cas9. I also learned ballroom dancing and got the chance to travel to Asia and Latin America. Pregnancy immunology is a fascinating topic. It is still not fully understood how the mother does not reject a fetus that is half foreign to her for 9 months and yet will promptly reject any tissue graft from that same child she gave birth to. Yet, it was hard to distill it down to cells and genes to be able to manipulate and control self-nonself recognition by my now favorite system in the body, the immune system. So, when it was time for a postdoctoral fellowship, I moved across the country to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to learn about regulatory T cells (Tregs), a subset of lymphocytes responsible for inhibiting specific responses, keeping unwanted inflammation at bay and even aiding in tissue repair. I learned a lot about Tregs, type 1 diabetes, and T cell engineering at UCSF and thoroughly enjoyed living in San Francisco. While Boston felt like the epicenter of science, San Francisco felt like the epicenter of technology. It is also a place of unique landscapes where the ocean meets the steepest and most rugged hills, on top of which sit majestic trees. Come 2020, the time came to look for an independent position. It was my time to be a professor and run my laboratory. After emails and Zoom interviews and follow-up emails and in-person interviews and more follow-up emails, I took up a position as an Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina and the Hollings Cancer Center here in Charleston, South Carolina in July 2021.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story. Has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what challenges have you had to overcome?
The path to where I am today has been full of excitement and discovery, but the road has been challenging at times. One thing I initially struggled with was academics. While the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) was relatively straightforward (Portugal is a small country with very high exposure to English through movies, music, books, and classes in school starting in 5th grade), it took me a lot of practice tests to master taking the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). A lot of new words and new ways of asking questions, not to mention how little time was given to answer each question. Starting my Ph.D. classes was hard at first, with a comprehensive set of topics being covered in class, demanding homework, and needing more time to digest it all because I had to juggle graduate-level classes with laboratory rotations. So, some of the struggles along the way had to do with adapting to a different academic culture and standard from college at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, to PhD at Harvard University. But I had great mentors and great friends along the way. I had roommates in the same Ph.D. program as me who went through many of the same motions with me and are still close friends. I was fortunate that in my Ph.D. lab, I had not one but two professors, as well as a senior postdoctoral fellow, as my advisors. There were many other struggles along the way, from spending the night in the lab only for the experiment to fail anyway or getting fellowships, job applications, and manuscripts rejected after many hours of planning, writing, and rewriting. That is, however, part of a life in science. If you don’t fail much more often than you succeed, you’re not trying hard enough.
As you know, we’re big fans of the Ferreira Lab. What can you tell our readers who might not be as familiar with it?
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. My laboratory works on designing and developing engineered immune cell therapies for autoimmune disease, cancer, and aging. We see the immune system as a collection of cells that can be weaponized as living drugs for various disorders. The immune system is simultaneously accessible (one can collect many immune cells via a blood draw) and widely distributed in the body (every tissue and organ has immune cells). Genetically engineering immune cells thus allows us to perform specific functions at specific locations in the body. As a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, I discovered a new regulatory DNA element that controls a gene involved in immune tolerance during pregnancy. I was also the first to report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in primary human cells, specifically T cells and hematopoietic stem cells, which can generate every cell type in the blood. I was part of a team using CRISPR/Cas9 to create hypoimmunogenic human pluripotent stem cells, which can generate every cell type in the body. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), I engineered immunosuppressive regulatory T cells (Tregs) with a new specificity by creating a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) specific for HLA-A2. This range of training and experiences has allowed me to build a lab where we can go from designing a new DNA sequence on a computer to testing immune cells engineered with that new DNA sequence in a disease animal model. Given that MUSC has a clinical-grade cell manufacturing facility and a culture of collaboration between physicians and scientists like myself, I envision some of our discoveries in the lab to be translated into patients this decade.
Do you have any advice for those just starting?
One piece of advice for those starting is to work towards something that you care about not just now but also 10, 20, 30 years from now. It will be challenging to know exactly what that is. I didn’t take any classes in immunology in college in Portugal, so I certainly did not predict being an immunology professor in the United States. But I have always wanted to be a scientist and discover new ways of doing things. So anytime classes were challenging, experiments failed, applications were rejected, or people had disparaging comments, I thought, “Too bad if it’s hard, it’s what I want to do, and I will keep giving it my best.” Another piece of advice is to surround yourself with good people. People who are there for you in the tough times. People who also push you and criticize you. A final advice would be to not compare yourself too much to others. There will always be people who are better than you at something and others who are worse than you. Sometimes, so much better that it makes you want to give up. Other times, so much worse that it gives you too much self-confidence. As the years go by, I wonder if that matters that much. If you want to do something, you will find a way. You will find people who believe in you. You will find the resources. You have to passionate about it, though.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ferreiralab.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leoinamerica/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leonardo.ferreira.7739/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonardomrferreira/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/enhancerleo/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LeoinAmerica
- Other: https://www.leonardomrferreira.com/
Image Credits
Cliff Rhodes
