Medical Scientist Training Program Class of 2014
Founding director at Stanford Center for Immunotherapy Design, associate professor of pathology and co-director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Stanford University School of Medicine
Ansuman “Ansu” Satpathy, MD, PhD, has built a career at the intersection of scientific discovery and entrepreneurship. A 2014 graduate of WashU Medicine’s Medical Scientist Training Program, Satpathy exemplifies a new kind of physician-scientist — one who moves fluidly between academia, biotech and venture capital to accelerate the innovation pipeline.
Satpathy’s research integrates immunology, genomics and computation to uncover how the immune system functions in health and disease. His discoveries are reshaping immunotherapy, showing how exhausted immune cells can be reprogrammed to keep fighting cancer, and how treatment responses to checkpoint inhibitors — drugs that block proteins cancer uses to shut down immune cells — can be more accurately predicted. By combining genomic tools with clinical insight, Satpathy’s work is turning the complexities of the immune system into real hope for patients.
These insights have informed new therapeutic approaches and laid the foundation for multiple biotechnology ventures. He is a co-founder of Cartography Biosciences, Immunai, Santa Ana Bio and Arpelos Biosciences — companies working at the frontier of immunotherapy and precision medicine. As a venture partner at Wing Venture Capital, he also helps identify and accelerate technologies poised to transform health care.
Satpathy’s path reflects a growing shift in up-and-coming physician-scientists: They are not only answering fundamental questions but also shaping how those answers get translated into patient benefit. It’s a trajectory rooted in the dual training he received at WashU Medicine, which equipped him to bridge disciplines, embrace risk and chart new terrain for the physician-scientists who follow.
Published in the Autumn 2025 issue