Dr. Bluestone joined our Board in December 2020. Dr. Bluestone is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Sonoma Biotherapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing engineered regulatory T cell therapies to treat serious autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. He has held this role since 2019. From 2015 to 2019, he led the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy as President and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Bluestone is the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Diabetes Center at University of California San Francisco, where he has been a member of the faculty and served in various other roles for over 20 years, including the Director of the Diabetes Center from 2000 to 2019. He is an international leader in the field of immunotherapy and has published more than 500 papers over nearly four decades focused on understanding the basic processes that control T-cell activation and immune tolerance in autoimmunity, organ transplantation and cancer. His research has led to the development of multiple immunotherapies, including the first medicine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to delay/prevent autoimmune Type 1 diabetes and the first FDA-approved checkpoint inhibitor for the treatment of metastatic melanoma and other cancers. Dr. Bluestone was the founding director of the Immune Tolerance Network, the largest National Institutes of Health-funded multicenter clinical immunology research program, testing novel immunotherapies in transplantation, autoimmunity and asthma/allergy. He served as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel, appointed by then Vice President Joe Biden, as a member of the National Cancer Moonshot Task Force. Dr. Bluestone is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and previously served as the Ludwig Professor and Director of the Ben May Institute at the University of Chicago. He previously served on the board of directors of Provention Bio, Inc. from 2013 to 2022.
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