Roundtable #9 - Future of Immunology w/ Vijay Kuchroo & Jeffrey Bluestone | BIOS

Guests: Jeffrey Bluestone - Professor Emertius @ UCSF & Vijay Kuchroo - Professor @ Harvard Jeffrey Bluestone - A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Metabolism and Endocrinology at UCSF Jeff Bluestone is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Sonoma Biotherapeutics and the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Diabetes Center of The University of California, San Francisco. Bluestone is a highly accomplished scientific researcher and 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 and commercialization of multiple immunotherapies, including the first FDA-approved drug targeting T-cell costimulation to treat autoimmune disease and organ transplantation and the first FDA-approved CTLA-4 antagonist drugs for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. He was part of the team of early developers of a novel anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody, now called teplizumab, a pro-tolerogenic drug that has shown clinical activity in type 1 diabetes, psoriatic arthritis, and the reversal of kidney transplant rejection. In addition to his research, Bluestone 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. He recently led the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy as president and CEO. He served as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel, a board of scientific experts appointed by then Vice President Joe Biden to guide the NCI Cancer Moonshot Research Initiative. He was also the Ludwig Professor and director of the Ben May Institute at The University of Chicago and served as a senior investigator at the NCI. Bluestone holds a BS and an MS from Rutgers University and a PhD in immunology from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. & Vijay Kuchroo - Samuel L. Wasserstrom chair of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Broad Institute, and Brigham & Women’s Hospital Vijay Kuchroo is an institute member of the Broad Institute and a participant in a Klarman Cell Observatory project that focuses on T cell differentiation. Kuchroo is the Samuel L. Wasserstrom Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and senior scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is founding director of the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His major research interests include autoimmune diseases and cancer, particularly the role of co-inhibitory “check-point” molecules in regulating autoimmunity and anti-tumor immunity, and the role of proinflammatory Th17 in inducing autoimmunity and tissue inflammation. His laboratory has made several transgenic mice that serve as animal models for human disease. Kuchroo came to the United States in 1985 and was at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, as Fogarty International Fellow for a year before joining the department of pathology at Harvard Medical School as a research fellow. He later joined the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a junior faculty member. He obtained his degree in veterinary medicine from the College of Veterinary Medicine, Hisar, India. Subsequently, he specialized in veterinary pathology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane (Australia), where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1985. He received the Fred Z. Eager Research Prize and medal for his Ph.D. research work at the University of Queensland. Based on his contributions, he was awarded the Javits Neuroscience Award by the National Institutes of Health in 2002 and the Award in Medical Research from the Ranbaxy Science Foundation in 2011. He was the recipient of the Peter Doherty lecture/award in 2014. _______________________ Join BIOS Community 🎉 Become a member, continue the conversation, connect with like-minded Life Science innovators, access exclusive resources, & invite-only events… Apply to Join —https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FA... For More Interesting Content 💭 🦾 Website: https://www.bios.community/ 🧬 Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2HmcPq9... 🧪 Medium:   / bios   🩺 Twitter:   / bios_community   🦠 LinkedIn:   / bios-community   🧠 Substack: https://bioscommunity.substack.com _______________________ BIOS: Nucleus of Life Science Innovation 🚀 Alix Ventures: Driving Patient Impact - Supporting Early Stage Startups Engineering Biology to Create Radical Advances in Human Health🌟