Filipe Pereira awarded the Emerging Alumni Leader Award 2025 from Imperial College London

Filipe Pereira completed his PhD in Biomedical Sciences in 2009 at Imperial College London, UK. He is now being awarded the prestigious Emerging Alumni Award for Imperial’s graduates with breakthroughs that placed them as “rising stars, innovators, game-changers and future leaders”. This award celebrates inspiring mentors and great leaders in their respective fields, who are unafraid of taking risks and collaborating to produce significant social impact and tackle global problems.

Filipe’s early decision to choose between two fields of study – biology and architecture – has gradually shaped into a biology-centered career with whispers of an architectural spirit. When interviewed about his path, Filipe remarks that the Pereira Team is architecting the fate of cells to build the future of cancer immunotherapy. At Imperial, Filipe learned how to approach science; he now applies that knowledge to lead the Pereira group and inspire early-career researchers into becoming the new generation of scientists.

The Pereira team is exploring the potential of cellular reprogramming to boost the global effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy. In the piece announcing the award, Filipe shares that the success of immune checkpoint blockade in immunotherapy triggered an initial idea for a different strategy to harness the immune system: reprogram immune cells and develop new immunotherapies. To that date, only macrophages had been reprogrammed; now, the Pereira team has expanded the immune repertoire to include dendritic cells.

The Emerging Alumni Leader Award constitutes a great honor to Filipe and the Pereira team, who aspire to apply their research into making a difference for patients – not only in cancer, but potentially in autoimmune diseases, organ rejection, and infections. Filipe’s contribution to the development of personalized and scalable therapies is grounded on his excellent training and current networks, for which he is deeply thankful. Since the team is currently advancing cellular reprogramming to be the next generation of immunotherapies, this award truly recognizes the work that everyone puts in.

The full piece from Imperial College can be found here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/stories/alumni-awards-2025-filipe/.