Sector: Healthcare
Industry: Biotechnology
Full Time Employees: 320
Founded in 2009
HQ in Seattle, Washington
http://www.adaptivebiotech.com
Adaptive Biotechnologies, which was founded by brothers Chad and Harlan Robins in 2009, has already picked up partnerships with corporate giants Microsoft and Roche Holding AG, ROG, subsidiary Genentech. The company struck a seven-year deal with Microsoft in 2017 to use the tech giant’s machine learning and computational statistics technology to make a map of the interactions between antigens and immune receptors, and in 2018, Adaptive entered a drug-development partnership with Genentech to make T-cell therapies for cancers.
Right now, the company has two main products. The first is ImmunoSEQ, a life-sciences research service the company licenses out to researchers. The second, ClonoSEQ, is a test approved by the Food and Drug Administration to detect the remaining number of cancer cells in the bone marrow of patients with multiple myeloma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Adaptive is also working on developing another test for early disease detection called ImmunoSEQ Dx.
The adaptive immune system is made up of immune cells called T cells and B cells that can detect when something foreign enters the body, whether it’s bacteria, a virus or cell mutation. T cells sense and bind to these signals of disease, or antigens, which then leads to an immune response. Essentially, the immune system both detects and treats diseases, and Adaptive thinks that decoding the massive bank of genetic information housed in immune receptors will allow it to do the same for specific illnesses.
