By the time Fred Ramsdell heard the news Oct. 6 while camping in Montana that he had won a Nobel Prize, he had hundreds of messages waiting for him, including from a company he helped start that has a Sonoma County connection.
Ramsdell, who co-founded biotechnology company Sonoma Biotherapeutics, made headlines for missing the call from the Nobel committee that he and two others had been awarded the 2025 prize for medicine for their research into the immune system. On the day of the announcement, he was out of cellphone range vacationing off the grid near Yellowstone National Park, The New York Times reported.
SonomaBio congratulated Ramsdell in an Oct. 6 news release, saying that his work to identify the gene that caused autoimmune diseases in mice was a breakthrough in the research to prevent those diseases in which immune cells attack a patient’s own body…