I have long held interest in understanding how cell identity is acquired, maintained, and ultimately modified or reversed. During my PhD, I made my first contributions to the field of cellular reprogramming by establishing cell fusion and heterokaryons to study mechanisms of reprogramming towards pluripotency. Of note, I implicated the essential role of Polycomb repression in reprogramming. During my postdoc, I applied concepts of cell reprogramming to hematopoeisis for the first time. I identified a combination of transcription factors that induces hemogenesis and established that reprogramming approaches can inform the developmental specification of hematopoietic stem cells. Afterwards, my independent research group has shown that cooperative transcription factor binding mediates hemogenesis and implicated GATA2 mitotic bookmarking in vivo for the first time (Silvério-Alves, Nature Communications 2023). My group also pioneered cell fate reprogramming approaches in immunology with induced dendritic cells. We identified a combination of transcription factors composed by PU.1, IRF8 and BATF3 capable of reprogramming mouse and human fibroblasts antigen-presenting dendritic cells (Rosa et al, Science Immunology 2018; Rosa et al, Science Immunology 2022). This approach was then creatively applied to and cancer cells to counteract immune evasion mechanisms such as downregulation of antigen presentation and therefore restore cancer cell immunogenicity (Zimmermannova et al, Science Immunology 2023). This conceptual shift opened exciting opportunities to develop a new immunotherapy modality based on cellular reprogramming in vivo. In our recent pre-clinical work, we showed in vivo DC reprogramming of cancer cells that elicited antigen-specific immune responses, mounting robust and lasting antitumor immunity (Ascic et al Science 2024). With the vision of harnessing dendritic cell reprogramming for cancer immunotherapy that could be translated to an improvement in the lives of cancer patients, I co-founded Asgard Therapeutics and BRT Blood Reprogramming Technologies together with 2 members of my research group. The conceptual shift in immune cell reprogramming creates exciting opportunities for novel gene and cell therapies that harness specific modules of the immune response, which my research group at Coimbra and Lund Universities is exploring with a focus on the unique features of myeloid and lymphoid immune cell populations.