Ragan Pitner PhD

Dr. Ragan Pitner, PhD, is an immunologist and immune engineer aiming to develop novel cell therapies to treat autoimmune disease in children. He earned his PhD in immunology from the University of Washington under the mentorship of Dr. David Rawlings, developing a B cell engineering approach to blunt the generation of antibody-derived drug inhibitors. Before his doctoral studies, he worked as a biochemist in preclinical research and development at PAI Life Sciences in Seattle. Before relocating to Seattle, he earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering by designing orthogonal cell signaling platforms in Dr. Joshua Leonard’s synthetic biology lab at Northwestern University.

Pitner chose to remain in the Rawlings Lab as an Invent Affiliate, where he intends to leverage the lab’s expertise in gene editing B cells to further develop the “decoy” platform he developed under Dr. Rawlings and Dr. Richard James. His work will focus on augmenting decoy B cells with regulatory cargo to drive antigen-specific tolerance and treat autoimmune diseases. He hopes that such therapies, given to children, might prevent the lifelong pain and permanent physical damage he has seen his mother suffer in her battle with systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. He is passionate not only about the research that drives cutting-edge cell therapies, but also about equitably translating them into the clinic.