Dr. Fred Ramsdell was named a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in the discovery of the gene, FOXP3, and its role in Treg development, which changed the field of immunology.

A co-founder of Sonoma Biotherapeutics, Dr. Ramsdell was the former CSO and current Scientific Advisory Board Chair of the Company. He is a veteran biotechnology leader in immunology with nearly three decades of experience and was named the 2017 Crafoord Prize – Polyarthritis along with Dr. Alexander Rudensky, PhD, co-founder and scientific advisor to SonomaBio.

Dr. Ramsdell earned his doctoral degree in microbiology and immunology from the University of California, Los Angeles and holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and cell biology from the University of California, San Diego.

Following a fellowship at the NIH, Dr. Ramsdell joined Immunex studying T cell activation and tolerance, with a focus on gene discovery and functional characterization. He later joined Darwin Molecular (which was later acquired by Celltech R&D) to establish the immunology program. Amongst other programs, he led the team that discovered and characterized FOXP3, a gene critical to the function of regulatory T cells. Dr. Ramsdell joined ZymoGenetics in 2004, where he led teams studying novel proteins with potential regulatory activity in lymphoid cells. In 2008, Novo Nordisk brought on Dr. Ramsdell to help establish Novo’s new Inflammation Research Center in Seattle and lead the Immunobiology group.

Prior to SonomaBio, Dr. Ramsdell was the CSO at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) where he helped to build and advance multiple research programs from the inception of the Institute.