Where the money goes: MUSC Hollings Cancer Center researcher using LOWVELO funding to revolutionize treatment for solid tumors

Kristin Lee

April 02, 2025

a man lets out a whoop as he crosses the finish line in a bike ride — Dr. Leonardo Ferreira has been an ardent supporter of LOWVELO since his arrival at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center. Photo by Kristin Lee

Most people don’t have a positive reaction to seeing blood. But MUSC Hollings Cancer Center researcher Leonardo Ferreira, Ph.D. isn’t most people.

“Every time I look at a drop of blood, I see cells screaming to be weaponized against cancer.”

Ferreira has had this fascination with blood and science since he was a young boy playing soccer in Portugal, where he grew up. He remembers injuring his knees on the field and watching in fascination as his wounds healed.

“Then, fast forward many years to when I was an undergraduate,” said Ferreira. “I learned about genetic engineering, and I was like ‘Oh, OK. So, it’s not that you can just understand how life works. You can also control how it works.’ I think I’ve been hooked on that idea ever since.”

And with that understanding, Ferreira has realized that with the right research in the right area of science, he has the potential to change lives.

“Cancer is a devastating group of diseases that really needs such breakthroughs,” he said. “And so, I think it's fertile grounds for these kind of approaches to bear fruit and to really help many patients lives. That’s what keeps me waking up every morning – is to understand the science that's behind how immune cells work and how I can change them.”

That’s what Ferreira’s lab at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center is working to do.

Funded in part by LOWVELO, his lab hopes to bring a game-changing treatment – already showing success in liquid tumors – for use in solid tumors. CAR-T cell therapy is an immunotherapy approach now approved for use in the treatment of blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. This is a last resort immunotherapy treatment used after all other standard treatments have been tried.

a man in white lab coat and black gloves peers into a microscope in a laboratory — Dr. Leonardo Ferreira is seeking to adapt a therapy used in blood cancers to solid tumors. Photo by Clif Rhodes

During CAR-T cell therapy, T-cells are isolated and collected from the patient, re-engineered in a laboratory to become cancer fighters and multiplied into the millions. They are then put back into the patient. In a successful treatment, the CAR-T cells will continue to multiply in the patient’s body and begin to recognize and kill the cancer cells.

Hollings has enrolled its first blood cancer patients in a clinical trial to receive "purified" CAR-T cells developed at Hollings and has had so much success that the researchers have been able to secure a large grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) allowing them to continue their work and help more patients across the state.

“But liquid tumors are a very different beast from solid tumors,” said Ferreira. “Solid tumors, at this point in time, they are better immunologists than we are because solid tumors have learned all the tricks in the book to basically turn the immune system in their favor.”

Those tricks help a solid tumor to keep out natural killer cells like T-cells and prevent the immune system from fighting off cancer.

“They literally build a castle, a fortress,” explained Ferreira. “So, anything that could hurt the solid tumor, they find a way to get rid of it. That’s why it’s been so hard to take CAR-T cell therapy to the solid tumor stage as compared to liquid tumors.”

The goal of Ferreira’s lab is to learn how to retrain the immune system to sidestep the tumor’s evasion tactics and fight off the solid tumors in cancers, like pancreatic cancer. To do this, they are trying to combine the properties they want in a cell to create the perfect killer cell for a solid tumor. It is a high-risk, but high-reward type of research – which also means, it is hard to secure funding through the typical avenues. That’s when the LOWVELO funding becomes so crucial, according to Ferreira. It allows researchers, like those in his lab, to begin the early stages of research, to develop a plan and to gather data about what might or what might not work.

“Someone once said that probably the cure for cancer is sitting in someone’s drawer,” he said. “You think and think and think but you don’t have the data yet. So, without LOWVELO funding, it never gets off the piece of paper.”

Knowing that a lot of what his lab tries could fail, Ferreira said they are hedging their bets.

“But if something works, then you can multiply that investment by probably a hundred-fold. You put in $50,000 and you get $5 million back, because once you have the data, you can convince people this is worth pursuing.”

Though LOWELO funding has proved critical to his work, Ferreira has also found the ride to be a place of community. One of the first things he did when he moved to Charleston in 2021 was to buy a bike. He rides it to work at Hollings every day, has joined a weekend training group with other faculty members and has been part of the ride every year since.

“You feel like a family. It's cancer, not against one – it's cancer against all of us,” said Ferreira. “And so, I think it gives me renewed hope that our efforts combined in the research and the fundraising and the getting together as a group of people can really help defeat this disease once and for all. I ride for LOWVELO because I see it a lot like my research,” said Ferreira. “It can be painful at times, but you’ve got to push to the end and the reward is immeasurable.”