Benaroya Research Institute (BRI) at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health is proud to announce that Peter Linsley, PhD, has been honored with the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dr. Linsley has spent nearly three decades advancing biotechnology and pharmaceutical research, transforming fundamental scientific discoveries into life-changing therapies. Early in his career, he made groundbreaking discoveries about how the immune system is regulated, identifying key molecular interactions that helped shape the field of immunology and ultimately fueled Nobel Prize-winning research in immune checkpoint biology.
Building on this foundational work, Dr. Linsley co-discovered Orencia® (abatacept), a widely used therapy for rheumatoid arthritis that continues to improve the lives of patients worldwide. Today, he is pioneering new approaches in the pursuit of personalized medicine, in which doctors will be able to choose the best treatment with the least amount of adverse effects for each patient based on their unique biology. Dr. Linsley is focused on identifying molecular markers that predict autoimmune disease progression and applying single-cell RNA sequencing to uncover the cellular mechanisms of type 1 diabetes, cancer and other immune-mediated conditions.
“Dr. Linsley is an extraordinary scientist who exemplifies BRI’s mission of predicting, preventing, reversing and curing immune system diseases,” said Jane Buckner, PhD, BRI president. “His early work led to the development of a drug that has been life changing for my patients with rheumatoid arthritis. More recently, his work has changed the way we think about the causes of type 1 diabetes and his ongoing studies will pave the way for more precise, effective treatments that improve patient outcomes.”
A major challenge in recent years has been analyzing the vast complexity of single-cell sequencing data, which can generate a staggering amount of data points from a single cell. Dr. Linsley and his team have developed innovative bioinformatic methods to interpret these massive datasets, enabling BRI scientists to uncover how autoimmune diseases begin and progress.
Dr. Linsley also founded and built BRI’s Center for Systems Immunology, which harnesses advanced computational methods to unlock insights from vast immunology datasets. Under his leadership, the center has grown to include 12 bioinformaticians who collaborate across BRI, fueling discoveries that keep the institute at the forefront of human immunology research.
Throughout his career, Dr. Linsley has been guided by a central question: How can this discovery help people? His relentless curiosity and commitment to translating science into therapies have improved countless lives and continue to shape the future of immunology research.
The Puget Sound Business Journal’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award was presented at a ceremony on December 4, 2025.
For more information about BRI, visit www.benaroyaresearch.org.
