Leonardo Ferreira Receives Trainee Poster Award from the American Association of Immunologists

Leonardo M.R. Ferreira, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar and molecular immunologist in the Tang Lab and Bluestone Lab at UCSF, received a "Trainee Poster Award" from the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) at the organization's 2018 annual meeting in Austin, Texas. The award is given for first-author abstracts submitted for poster sessions found to be exceptional by the AAI Abstract Programming Chairs.

The poster, entitled “Tailoring a New Generation of Chimeric Antigen Receptors for Regulatory T Cells”, reported on Dr. Ferreira’s research on the design and development of novel chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) to confer new target specificities and maximize Treg function. This approach to engineering Tregs offers promise to establish immune tolerance in the clinic. Autoimmunity, organ transplant rejection, and inflammatory disorders are caused by an improper balance of pro-inflammatory effector T cells and anti-inflammatory T regulatory (Treg) cells.

Dr. Ferreira's collaborators in this work included Anupurna Kaul, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar in the Tang lab, Ryan Guerrero-Moreno, a research assistant in the Tang lab, Jeffrey Bluestone, Ph.D., A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor of Metabolism and Endocrinology and Director of the Hormone Research Institute in the Diabetes Center, and Qizhi Tang, Ph.D., Professor and Director of the Transplantation Research Laboratory and Tang Lab in the UCSF Department of Surgery. 

Dr. Ferreira's interview at the AAI 2018 conference