Dr. António Ferreira
António Ferreira, PhD
“Mechanisms of malignancy driven by CLL Proliferation-Associated (CPA) fibroblasts”
CLL is the most common adult leukemia in the Western world, and while current targeted therapies have significantly improved outcomes for many patients, CLL often persists and eventually returns. A major reason for this is that CLL cells do not survive in isolation. Within lymph nodes, which are the primary sites where CLL cells divide and grow, leukemia cells receive critical survival signals from surrounding cells that form a protective environment. Understanding how that environment is constructed and maintained has become one of the most important frontiers in CLL research, and is essential for developing more effective and durable treatments.
Dr. António Ferreira’s research centers on a newly identified population of cells called CLL Proliferation-Associated fibroblasts, or CPA fibroblasts, discovered through detailed studies of patient lymph node tissue. These specialized cells appear to act as “support cells” that create protective niches where CLL cells can shelter, divide, and resist the effects of treatment. Using advanced single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial tissue analysis, his work is designed to understand and map how CPA fibroblasts communicate with CLL and immune cells within the lymph node environment.
The goal of this research is to identify the molecular signals that allow these protective niches to form and sustain CLL growth. By uncovering the mechanisms that connect leukemia cells to the CPA fibroblasts that support them, Dr. Ferreira hopes to uncover new strategies to disrupt the tumor microenvironment and improve treatment outcomes for patients with CLL.
This work represents a significant step in moving CLL research beyond the leukemia cell itself and toward a more complete understanding of the ecosystem that allows it to survive. The findings are designed to lay the groundwork for future therapeutic approaches that attack CLL not just directly, but by dismantling the environment that sustains it.
About Dr. Ferreira
António Ferreira, PhD, is a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School whose work focuses on understanding how the tumor microenvironment supports the survival and growth of blood cancer cells, with a particular focus on CLL. Using single-cell genomics, spatial transcriptomics, multiplex microscopy, and functional laboratory approaches, his research aims to identify the stromal and immune cell interactions within lymph nodes that allow CLL cells to proliferate and resist therapy.
Dr. Ferreira’s work has contributed to the identification of specialized fibroblast and immune cell populations associated with malignant proliferation in CLL, laying a scientific foundation for new therapeutic strategies that target the disease’s supportive microenvironment rather than the leukemia cells alone.
