Jeffrey Bluestone, PhD

Jeffrey Bluestone is the co-founder and CEO of Sonoma Biotherapeutics. Over four decades he has published 500+ papers focused on understanding the basic processes that control T-cell activation and immune tolerance in autoimmunity, organ transplantation, and cancer. His work has informed the development of multiple immunotherapies, including the first FDA-approved drug targeting T-cell costimulation to treat autoimmune disease and organ transplantation; the FDA-approved anti-human CD3 antibody teplizumab to treat type 1 diabetes; and the first CTLA-4 antagonist drugs approved for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. His recent research has focused on the critical role of regulatory T cells in autoimmune diseases, which is being exploited as a cell-based therapy—the focus of Sonoma Biotherapeutics. An academic leader on an international scale, Dr. Bluestone is the former CEO of PICI and was the founding director of the Immune Tolerance Network, the largest NIH-funded multicenter clinical immunology research program, testing novel immunotherapies in transplantation, autoimmunity, and asthma/allergy. While holding the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professorship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Dr. Bluestone also served as UCSF executive vice chancellor and provost and was the former director of the UCSF Diabetes Center. He has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, and as an appointed member of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s NCI Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel. Dr. Bluestone holds a BS and an MS from Rutgers University and a PhD in immunology from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.