SEMINAR ; Dr Jordi ROVIRA - CAR-T Cell Therapy for Transplantation and Kidney Diseases: Recent Advances

Dr Jordi Rovira graduated from Universitat de Girona (Spain) with a degree in Biology, and subsequently completing his doctoral thesis at the Biochemistry Unit of the Faculty of Medicine from the Universitat de Barcelona. In 2006, he joined at the Laboratori Experimental de Nefrologia i Trasplantatment (LENIT) at IDIBAPS. His research focused on the evaluation of the pathophysiological mechanisms of proteinuria associated with treatment with inhibitors of the mTOR pathway using experimental models of chronic renal failure and renal transplantation. Furthermore, he studied some side effects due to treatment with mTOR inhibitors; weight loss, diabetes, anemia, testicular and pulmonary toxicities. In 2011, he initiated a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Experimental Surgery at the University Hospital Regensburg (Germany), under the mentorship of Dr Edward K Geissler. During this period, Dr Rovira expanded his expertise by acquiring knowledge in a range of experimental models, including skin and heart transplantation, ischemia-reperfusion injury in liver and kidney, tumor progression and metastasis models, as well as flow cytometry and cell culture techniques. In April 2013, he returned to LENIT where he implemented all the techniques he had learned. Since the reincorporation, he has led several studies in the field of transplant immunology in collaboration with Dr Diekmann. He is currently involved in the search for new therapeutic strategies to prolong the renal graft survival in both animal models and, as far as possible, in clinical trials.Dr Rovira has contributed to the design and development of studies incorporating diverse cell therapies, including mesenchymal stromal cells and their extracellular vesicles, tolerogenic dendritic cells, extracorporeal photopheresis (ECP), and the generation of CAR-T cells for kidney transplantation and kidney diseases. Since 2017, Dr Rovira has been actively involved in three consecutive research projects developing the chimeric HLA-antibody receptor (CHAR) therapy for desensitization and ABMR treatment in kidney transplantation. In 2022, he was awarded a basic research grant from the Acadèmia de les Ciències Mèdiques i de la Salut de Catalunya i de Balear, with the aim of developing "Adoptive cellular immunotherapy for the control of membranous nephropathy; use of genetically modified T cells with chimeric autoantibody receptors (CAAR-Tc)". Recently, he obtained a grant from the strategic plan for research and innovation in health of the Generalitat de Catalunya (PERIS’24) to validate the utility of CAAR-Tc.