Leonardo M.R. Ferreira is the founder and CEO of Torpedo Bio, a startup company developing a novel engineered immune cell therapy to eradicate solid tumors. Dr. Ferreira obtained a B.Sc. in biochemistry at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he studied cancer metabolism in the laboratory of Dr. Ana Urbano. He obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in the laboratories of Dr. Jack Strominger and Dr. Chad Cowan, where he was the first to report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in human T cells and hematopoietic stem cells, helped creating hypoimmune pluripotent stem cells, and discovered a new enhancer element controlling a gene key to immune tolerance during pregnancy. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco in the laboratories of Dr. Qizhi Tang and Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone, where he developed chimeric antigen receptor regulatory T cells (CAR Tregs) to prevent graft-vs-host disease and protect pancreatic islet transplants from immune rejection. He is an assistant professor of Pharmacology and Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina and co-leader of the lung cancer transdisciplinary team at Hollings Cancer. His laboratory has discovered that high affinity CAR signaling induces inflammatory gene programs in Tregs and co-developed CAR Tregs to protect stem cell-derived beta cells from immune rejection.