João Santana da Silva
Fiocruz
Brazil
I am a senior scientist at the Fiocruz. My work over the past 25 years aims at elucidating the mechanisms of immune regulation during infections, mainly by Trypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania spp. My work focused in the mechanism by which the effector immune response raised against the parasites results in tissue aggression, as in the heart disease in patients with Chagas’disease and in the skin lesions in patients with leishmaniasis. Work done by our group (around 250 papers) revealed the mechanism of which the macrophage can kill intracellular parasites and those that leads to neuronal destruction in the heart tissue, resulting in cardiac diseases. We also described how the regulatory T cells control the T. cruzi-induced heart diseases and how these cells control the lesions in patients infected with L. braziliensis. I have organized several Congress of immunology in Brazil and I am a delegate of IUIS.