After studying Biology as an undergraduate at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, I worked at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência for three years during which time I developed a keen interest in Immunology more specifically in the field of transplantation. Those three years were such an exciting learning period that I then decided to continue my studies in Transplantation Immunology whereupon I moved to Oxford to conduct a D.Phil. project with Professor Kathryn Wood.
It was during such studies that, in collaboration with
Dr. Nick Jones, I found that donor-reactive regulatory T cells can suppress allograft rejection using distinct mechanisms in both the peripheral lymphoid tissue as well as in the graft itself. We were able to show that donor-reactive regulatory T cells (Treg) initially diminished the priming and proliferation of naïve CD8+ T cells to a fully MHC mismatched skin allograft in the draining lymph nodes, but that with time CD8+ effector T cells were generated that infiltrated the allograft. Rejection however did not occur as Treg concomitantly migrated to the allograft preventing the immune response locally by inducing the deletion of effector T cells. We believe that these data revealing multiple mechanisms of regulation elicited by Treg within the same model serve to provide a plausible explanation for the different mechanisms of regulation identified in a number of other studies and suggest that many of the mechanisms, both in lymphoid tissue as well as at the site of inflammation, may coexist in all models of regulation. We have now published this work in the Journal of Immunology last year and it is a great honour to be recognized by the BTS with the
Sir Roy Calne award.
It is great to see that your peers find your work as interesting and important as you do and it is an incentive to continue to work in the field. I am currently still in Oxford working as a postdoctoral scientist with Dr. Nick Jones and continuing to work on deciphering further mechanisms implicated in the control of pathogenic T cells by Treg. These are likely to depend on the time studied after Ag challenge, the location and longevity of Ag recognition, and the relative strength of the potential T cell response and we are currently testing this hypothesis. We believe it is an important piece of work as extrapolation of these data to clinical transplantation suggests that the identification of patients that have become "operationally" tolerant to their foreign organ grafts will require a multifaceted approach involving both peripheral and perhaps more importantly analyses that focus on the transplanted organ itself
