After earning his PhD, Ramsdell served a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. After that, he joined the biopharmaceutical company Immunex, where his research focus was T cell activation and tolerance, and gene discovery.[6][3] In 1994, he joined the Bothell, Washington-based biotechnology company Darwin Molecular (along with Mary E. Brunkow), where he established an immunology program. Darwin Molecular was acquired by Chiroscience in 1996. Three years later, Chiroscience merged with Celltech (briefly under the name Celltech Chiroscience). In 2004, Ramsdell and Brunkow left the company.[6][7]
He joined ZymoGenetics in 2004 where he led research teams focusing on novel proteins with potential regulatory activity in lymphoid cells.[8] In 2008, he started working at Novo Nordisk where he helped establish the firm's Inflammation Research Center in Seattle and became leader of the immunobiology group.[8][3]
In 2019, he co-founded the San Francisco-based Sonoma Biotherapeutics with Jeffrey Bluestone, Qizhi Tang and Alexander Rudensky,[9] where he held the role of chief scientific officer.[10] As of 2025, he is the chair of the company's scientific advisory board.[11]
Research
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025: FoxP3 Treg cells in peripheral immune tolerance.
In the 1990s, while working at Celltech in Bothell, Washington, Ramsdell and Brunkow studied a strain of mice, called scurfy, characterized by serious autoimmune disease, setting out to identify the mutation responsible for the phenotype. After establishing a candidate region on the X chromosome containing approximately 20 potential genes, they identified an insertion of two base pairs in a previously unknown gene, which they named Foxp3. In 2001, in collaboration with Hans D. Ochs, Robert Wildin, and their teams, Ramsdell and Brunkow demonstrated that mutations in the human FOXP3 gene are found in IPEX syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease.[12][13]
Ramsdell was jointly awarded, with Sakaguchi and Mary E. Brunkow, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.[4] On the day of the announcement, he was unable to be contacted to receive his prize as he was hiking off-the-grid in Idaho.[16] Ramsdell later told the BBC that his first response when he did learn the news from his wife was "I did not!", to which she replied that she had 200 text messages suggesting otherwise.[17]
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