Northern California Chapter Annual Meeting & Research Discussion

Jeffrey Bluestone, PhD, is President & CEO @Sonoma Biotherapeutics and the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor, UCSF. He is a highly accomplished scientific researcher whose work over 4+ decades has led to more than 500 publications 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 an FDA-approved drug targeting T-cell activation in autoimmune disease; Teplizumab, an anti-CD3 drug efficacious in at-risk and new onset type 1 diabetes, the first CTLA-4 antagonist drugs approved by the FDA for the treatment of metastatic melanoma, and is leading the development of regulatory T cell therapies to treat autoimmunity. Dr. Bluestone was the founding Director of the Immune Tolerance Network, the largest NIH-funded clinical immunology research program, testing novel immunotherapies in transplantation, autoimmunity, and asthma/allergy.

Alex Marson, MD, PhD, is Director of the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology, and Associate Professor in the UCSF Department of Medicine. The Marson Lab is pioneering new CRISPR gene editing technologies that offer faster, cheaper and more precise ways to re-write DNA programs in human immune cells. With these tools, the lab is engineering new cellular immunotherapies for cancer. Marson attended college and medical school at Harvard. He received a master’s degree in Biological Sciences from Cambridge University and a PhD in Biology from MIT. Marson was a resident at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and completed clinical training in Infectious Diseases at UCSF. He started his lab as a UCSF Sandler Faculty Fellow in 2013. Marson is the scientific director for Human Health at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI). He is a member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and was selected as one of the inaugural Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigators.

Jennifer Schneider, MD, currently serves as President on the Breakthrough T1D Northern California Chapter Community Board, as well as on the Breakthrough T1D International Board of Directors. She is the President & Chief Medical Officer of Surf Bio, leveraging a novel biotechnology platform to develop enhanced therapeutic solutions for Diabetes, Oncology, HIV, COVID-19, and other therapeutic areas. She advises several early stage medical device companies and is a visiting scholar at Stanford. She also served as EVP for health and wellness for the Palo Alto Unified School District and developed a comprehensive diabetes plan for students in the district. Dr. Schneider’s daughter, Taylor, and husband, Dain, both live with type 1 diabetes (T1D). Her husband developed T1D as an adult, and just a few years later their daughter developed T1D at the age of two.

Aaron Kowalski, PhD, is the Chief Executive Officer of Breakthrough T1D. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of diabetes technologies and was a leader of Breakthrough T1D’s Artificial Pancreas Research Project. He has authored numerous articles on T1D research and was a coauthor of a landmark study in The New England Journal of Medicine that revealed the effectiveness of continuous glucose monitors in T1D management. He combines his professional experience as a scientist with his personal experience of living with T1D for over 30 years to help guide and champion Breakthrough T1D’s programs