Christian Furlan Freguia
Senior Vice President - Research Rise Therapeutics
Christian Furlan Freguia, PhD, serves as Senior Vice President of Research at Rise Therapeutics, where he leads the company’s scientific strategy, discovery portfolio, and translational research programs. His work focuses on developing next-generation immune-modulating therapeutics that act within the gut to reset dysregulated immune pathways.
Christian has more than 15 years of experience spanning immunology, synthetic biology, and therapeutic platform development. He has overseen multiple IND-enabling programs and early-phase clinical studies, including Rise’s oral immunomodulators for ulcerative colitis, Sjögren’s syndrome, and cancer. He is passionate about integrating mechanistic immunology with innovative drug delivery systems to create safe, targeted, and durable immune-resetting therapies. Prior to joining Rise, he held scientific leadership roles in biotech focused on engineered microbial therapeutics and mucosal immunology. Christian earned his PhD in molecular biology and has authored numerous publications and patents in immunotherapy and translational research.
Seminars
- Developing orally delivered immune biomodulators that selectively reprogram dendritic cells within the gut mucosa to drive systemic immune resetting
- Demonstrating how targeted conditioning of intestinal dendritic cells induces tolerogenic pathways, restores regulatory T-cell activity, and exerts downstream control of B-cell hyperactivation
- Summarizing key preclinical and emerging clinical findings, discuss platform design principles, and outline how oral immune therapies can provide safer, more durable, and more accessible treatment options for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases
Join this session for a candid conversation around the future of T-cell depletion for immune reset:
- Debating the technical feasibility and current limitations of logic-gated CAR-T cells in autoimmunity
- Discussing the emerging paradigm of T-cell modulation vs elimination including the modalities most promising for safely silencing autoreactive T-cells without long-term safety risks
- Effectively measuring the resulting state of functional tolerance
- Exploring the combination of translational biomarkers and clinical trial endpoints necessary to validate the safety and disease specificity of targeted T-cell therapies
