Institute: University of Oxford, UK
Biography
Professor Ferreira joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) in 2009 soon after obtaining her PhD in Immunology from the University of Sao Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil). Professor Ferreira is currently a Reader in Respiratory Infection and Vaccinology at the LSTM and lead a team of 22 members of staff with a research portfolio exceeding £5M funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
She leads an Experimental Human Pneumococcal Carriage (EHPC) Programme of which the overall aim is to develop improved vaccines against pneumonia. For this her group have established a method of experimentally inducing pneumococcal carriage in healthy human volunteers. More recently this model has also been expanded to include co-infection with live attenuated influenza virus. These pneumococcus and attenuated flu virus CHIM models can be used to: 1) define which immune responses and target antigens are protective against acquisition of pneumococcus; 2) discover how healthy subjects make immune responses to carriage and how that is altered by flu infection; 3) discover how subjects with risk factors (age, chronic lung disease) make responses to pneumococcus and how this is different from healthy people; 4) test new vaccines for their effect in pneumococcal carriage and 5) study the synergy between the pneumococcus and respiratory virus and how this is altered by the nasal microbiome.
Areas of interest: Vaccine development, Controlled Human Infection Models, immune responses to pneumococcal carriage, mucosal vaccines and adjuvants, pneumococcal infection. Experimental Human Pneumococcal Carriage consortium
Key Publications
A list of publications can be found here.
Web Links of Interest