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A Stanford medical student handles a blood sample.
- The Seattle biotech company Adaptive Biotechnologies has started research on a coronavirus therapeutic that could halt the spread of the virus.
- The small company has inked partnerships with industry behemoths to accelerate its work. It's working with Amgen, the world's largest biotech company, and with tech giant Microsoft.
- Harlan Robins, Adaptive's cofounder and chief scientific officer, told Business Insider how the biotech is approaching its biggest challenge yet.
- Robins said his team of scientists are now searching for "the Michael Jordan of antibodies" that can take down the virus.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
To counter the coronavirus pandemic, drug companies are designing therapeutics to attack the virus.
One upstart biotech is hunting for "the Michael Jordan of antibodies" to turn into a coronavirus drug. Adaptive Biotechnologies recently teamed up with Amgen, the world's largest biotech company, to develop a treatment that can fight the coronavirus.
Research is now underway to find the best antibodies, or virus-fighting proteins, to use against the virus. The body can craft millions, even billions, of unique antibodies. Adaptive's scientists are looking for the immune system's all-stars - or as Adaptive Chief Scientific Officer Harlan Robins put it, the "Michael Jordan of antibodies."
"We need to scour a bunch of different people and search through their full antibody response to find that one superstar antibody that, by random luck, sticks on a very specific place that screws up the function of the virus," said Robins, who's also Adaptive's cofounder.
The search is like simultaneously scouting every high-school basketball player in the nation, he said. But Adaptive is up to the task.
Since cofounding the company in 2009 with his brother, Chad Robins, Adaptive has specialized in understanding how the body's immune system fights viruses. That knowledge is now crucial to combating this novel coronavirus.
Adaptive
Harlan Robins, chief scientific officer of Adaptive Biotechnologies
"Our technology has been built to do this," Robins said. "We didn't have to shut down everything else and make a massive shift in what we do. It fits very nicely into what we do anyways."
The company went public last year, raising $315 million in one of biotech's biggest initial public offerings in 2019. The company employs about 450 people, referred to internally as "Adapters."
Adapting to the COVID world
Adaptive is headquartered in Seattle, which became the nation's first hotspot of coronavirus cases. Robins said he felt the urgency to respond after seeing the devastation an outbreak caused for a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs.
"As soon as we realized what we were dealing with, which like everyone else took us a little bit longer than it should've, but the minute it hit home, we said, 'That's it. Let's go,'" he said.
In the past few weeks, Adaptive entered research pacts with Amgen, to develop a coronavirus drug, and with Microsoft, to analyze the immune system's response to the virus.
While the biotech's scientists attempt to thwart the virus in the labs, the outbreak has required a "logistically crazy" setup to keep everyone healthy and minimize potential disruptions to the research if someone does get sick, Robins said.
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Blood from infected or just-recovered COVID-19 patients is first sent to Adaptive's San Francisco lab. Those researchers select the cells that are worth looking at in greater detail and ship them to Seattle, where another Adaptive lab does some processing work and puts the cells onto plates.
A van then drives the cells to another lab that is a block away - the two are firewalled to reduce the risk of spreading the virus.
The cells are then sequenced to get the digital genetic information on the antibodies they contain. This digital info is then sent to a partner that produces the antibodies and puts them into cells. Adaptive can then start screening these antibodies to see which work the best.
Some of these antibodies will, hopefully, neutralize the virus in test tubes. This research requires working with samples of the live virus. The key will be demonstrating that when a particular antibody is added, it stops the virus from infecting cells in test tubes, Robins said.
Employees not absolutely needed for this research aren't allowed in the buildings, Robins said, which can even include him. Robins talked with Business Insider from his home via video call, featuring an impromptu visit from his two-year-old son, Ellis Robins, who enjoyed a few Cheetos on a snack break.
A long path to reality, but research is moving as fast as possible
Adaptive
Adaptive scientists pipetting in the lab
Once Adaptive identifies promising antibodies, it'll hand its work over to Amgen. From there, Amgen will turn those antibodies into a drug. That'll involve still more lab testing, running human trials, and eventually mass-producing a product.
Adaptive and Amgen haven't given a timeline for when they expect to start human trials or have a product widely available. Robins said they are moving as fast as they can, and he expects the process to be measured in months instead of years.
The Amgen-Adaptive team is one of four major industry efforts to develop an antibody drug. The others are being led by Regeneron, Eli Lilly and AbCellera, and Vir Biotechnology and GlaxoSmithKline.
Former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb recently said these antibody treatments have "perhaps the best chance" of having a meaningful impact on the disease and being ready by the fall.
The projects by Regeneron, Eli Lilly, and Vir are all aiming to start clinical trials this summer. These experimental therapeutics pose a medium-term option between repurposed drugs, now being tested in patients, and vaccine work that will take longer to develop and fully test.
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