Victor Ferreira, PhD

Today is my 11th year anniversary at @uhnresearch.ca!
Very thankful for the amazing colleagues, trainees and friends I've made over the years and excited for the new connections and discoveries on the horizon.

I couldn’t have asked for a better partner than Dr. Victoria Hall who co-led this work with me. Thanks to the Ajmera Transplant Centre and PSI Foundation for their funding support, to Dr. Lavoie & his team, our UHN colleagues, and to the participants whose generosity made this work possible.

Safety and immunogenicity of adjuvanted respiratory syncytial virus vaccine in high-risk transplant recipients: An Interventional Cohort Study Allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplant (alloHCT) and lung transplant (LT) recipients are at highest risk for severe respiratory syncytial virus (RSV…

Our first publication addressing RSV vaccination in transplant recipients is now available in Clinical Microbiology and Infection: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We found marginal rates of seroconversion but robust CD4+ T cell responses after a single dose of adjuvanted vaccine.

Bifidobacteria support optimal infant vaccine responses - Nature Neonatal antibiotic use is shown to reduce immune response to infant vaccines, accompanied by reduced abundance of Bifidobacteria in the gut microbiota, with experiments in mice indicating that probio...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Feasibility and Safety of Ex Vivo Delivery of Rituximab to... : Transplantation Direct virus (EBV)-seropositive donors for transplantation into EBV-seronegative recipients (D+/R–) to reduce the risk of EBV-associated posttransplant lymphoproliferative disorder (PTLD), which remains a ma...

Our latest work 🚨 a first-in-human study:
We show that rituximab delivery via ex vivo lung perfusion is feasible and safe.

With some modifications, this could become a new way to eliminate EBV in donor lungs prior to transplantation.

journals.lww.com/transplantat...

UHN, Canada’s top hospital, is ranked third in the world for the second year in a row by @newsweek.com! This 2025 ranking solidifies UHN’s Toronto General Hospital as the top publicly-funded hospital in the world.

Read the full report here:
www.newsweek.com/rankings/wor...

In Press and Open Access! "Using machine learning for personalized prediction of longitudinal coronavirus disease 2019 vaccine responses in transplant recipients" by Azarfar et al. https://buff.ly/43u19aH
@victorhferreira.bsky.social #MachineLearning #SolidOrganTransplantation #Vaccination

Can anyone shed light on the new CIHR rankings? Is it safe to assume that all projects that rank in top 10% will be funded? Do we expect that some applications in the 11-25% rank will also be funded?

Figure. Antibody Responses Among Immunocompromised Adults Following Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) Vaccination

While immunocompromised individuals had a heterogeneous antibody response to RSV vaccines, those who received the adjuvanted RSVPreF3-AS01 vaccine showed better neutralization.

ja.ma/4iVzJzy

A single mutation in bovine influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin switches specificity to human receptors In 2024, several human infections with highly pathogenic clade 2.3.4.4b bovine influenza H5N1 viruses in the United States raised concerns about their capability for bovine-to-human or even human-to-h...

Excellent study by my Penn-CEIRR colleagues showing that a single HA substitution in H5 (at same exact residue that changed in the British Columbia case!) enables efficient H5N1 binding to receptors in the human upper airway.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks to Dr. Ghazal Azarfar for her hard work on this study, and Dr. Mamatha Bhat, the UHN Transplant AI Initiative and fellow co-authors for their support.

Traditional and deep learning architectures were compared. "Routed LSTM", which combines capsule networks with LSTM to reduce the need for larger datasets, performed best (0.02 MSE and 0.79 PCC).

Key predictors included age, BMI, immunosuppression, breakthrough infection and transplant type.

Using Machine Learning for Personalized Prediction of Longitudinal COVID-19 Vaccine Responses in Transplant Recipients The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of vaccines, especially for immunocompromised populations like solid organ transplant (SOT) recip…

Can machine learning be used to predict SARS-CoV-2 vaccine responses in immunocompromised transplant recipients one year after their first dose of vaccine?

Our latest study, accepted at American Journal of Transplantation, explores this question: tinyurl.com/59ehzfmk.

Pleased to share that our project (led by Victoria Hall, Atul Humar, Deepali Kumar, and myself) was one of 35 selected for funding to address the risk of avian influenza in Canada. We will study H5 vaccine responses & safety in immunocompromised transplant recipients.

www.canada.ca/en/institute...