Five influential Rutgers University graduates, renowned leaders in medicine, government, media, and civil rights, will be the newest members honored in the university’s Hall of Distinguished Alumni in a ceremony on April 25.
Among the new class to be inducted is Jeffrey Bluestone CC’74, GSNB’76, an internationally recognized immunologist whose four decades of groundbreaking research have led to the development of multiple immunotherapies, including breakthroughs in treating autoimmunity, metastatic melanoma and other cancers, and diabetes.
Jeffrey Bluestone CC’74, GSNB’76. Photo: Courtesy of Rutgers University Foundation.
Bluestone earned a bachelor’s degree in animal science and a master’s in microbiology at Rutgers. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in immunology from Cornell University in 1980. After a time as a staff fellow and, subsequently, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, he joined the University of Chicago Ben May Institute for Cancer Research in 1987 and remained there until 2000.
He joined the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) as the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor and founding director of the Diabetes Center at UCSF in 2000, remaining in that role until becoming professor emeritus in 2022. His lab has published more than 500 papers focused on the basic processes that control T-cell activation and immune tolerance in autoimmunity, organ transplantation, and cancer. The work has informed the development of multiple immunotherapies, including Abatacept, which targets T-cell co-stimulation to treat autoimmune disease; Teplizumab, the first immunotherapy to treat Type 1 diabetes; and the first CTLA-4 antagonist drugs approved for the treatment of metastatic melanoma and other cancers.
Bluestone also was 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. He served as UCSF’s executive vice chancellor and provost and was founding director and CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. He has trained more than 100 students, post-docs, and fellows who have gone on to outstanding careers in academia and industry.
In 2019, Bluestone co-founded and continues to lead 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 been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. He also has received the Gerold and Kayla Grodsky Distinguished Basic Scientist Award and the Mary Tyler Moore and S. Robert Levine, M.D., Excellence in Clinical Research Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, as well as a distinguished alumni award from Cornell Graduate School of Medical Science and mentorship awards from the American Association of Immunologists and the American Society of Transplantation.
This article first appeared on the Rutgers University Foundation website.
