Jeffrey A. Bluestone
Sonoma BioTherapeutics
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Primary Section: 43, Immunology and Inflammation Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2023)
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Biosketch
Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone received his BS and MS at Rutgers University (1974, 1977) and PhD in Medical Sciences at Cornell University (Sloan Kettering Division) in 1980. After stints as a Anna Fuller post-doctoral fellow, staff fellow and senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, he join the University of Chicago Ben May Institute for Cancer Research in 1987. Jeff went west to join UCSF in 2000 as the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor of Metabolism and Endocrinology and Founding Director of the UCSF Diabetes Center. In 2019, he co-founded and leads Sonoma Biotherapeutics, a cell therapy biotech company with a mission to develop regulatory T cell-based therapies to treat and cure autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. He has received numerous accolades for his work, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, both the Gerold & Kayla Grodsky Distinguished Basic Scientist Award and the Mary Tyler Moore & Robert Levine Excellence in Clinical Research Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. He has received the distinguished alumni award from the Cornell Graduate School of Medical Science and both AAI and AST Mentorship Awards.
Research Interests
Dr. Bluestone is an academic leader on a national and international scale. He was founding the director of the Immune Tolerance Network, the largest NIH-funded multicenter clinical immunology research program, testing novel immunotherapies in transplantation, autoimmunity, and asthma/allergy. Dr. Bluestone also served as Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UCSF and was founding Director and CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Over the past four decades, he has published over 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 co-stimulation to treat autoimmune disease and organ transplantation; the FDA-approved, anti-human CD3 antibody, Teplizumab, the first immunotherapy 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 to treat autoimmune diseases and organ transplant rejection. Importantly, Jeff have trained more than 100 students, post-docs and fellows, who have gone onto have outstanding careers in both academia and industry.
