The CEO of a $5.6 billion biotech that just had the year's best post-IPO pop told told us how it's partnering with Microsoft to build an enormous map of the human immune system
- Adaptive Biotechnologies, a biotech focused on using the body's disease-fighting immune system to make diagnostic tests and medicines, went public on Thursday.
- The stock rose 95% after the IPO, making it the best post-IPO pop for any company this year.
- Adaptive is working to map out the immune system as part of a partnership with Microsoft. Eventually, the goal is to make a blood test that could be used to diagnose many diseases, including cancer.
- CEO Chad Robins gave us an update on the program, which started last year and has early results in Celiac disease and ovarian cancer.
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The biotech Adaptive Biotechnologies, which just went public on Thursday in a splashy market debut, is taking on an ambitious goal: creating both diagnostic tests and drugs for human diseases, ranging from cancer to autoimmune conditions.
But when I called the biotech's slate just that - ambitious - while speaking with Adaptive CEO Chad Robins in New York City's Times Square, he stops me right there.
"If we can learn to read that information, and translate it, that is the key," Robins said, speaking with me at the Nasdaq stock exchange headquarters on Thursday, the day the company went public. "That's what our collaboration with Microsoft is all about."
Robins founded Adaptive with his scientist brother in 2009. On Thursday, shares of the Seattle, Washington-based biotech jumped 95% above its IPO price, marking the year's best post-IPO pop. The IPO brought in $300 million for Adaptive, making it the second-largest biotech IPO of 2019, after BridgeBio's $348.5 million haul, according to data from Renaissance Capital's IPO Pro platform.
Adaptive stock gained another $725 million in market value on Friday, bringing the company to a total value of $5.6 billion.
Microsoft partnership lends machine learning muscle to decode how our bodies fend off disease
Adaptive's mission is to map out the immune system. But if you're imagining a map posted up on the walls of its offices, think again - the company isn't drawing out an actual, physical map.
"It would go around the globe many, many, many times," Robins says. "If you think about all the data on the Internet, it's bigger than that. And that's why we need very sophisticated machine learning."
Robins himself is no machine learning expert. His brother, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Harlan Robins, a computational biologist, had more expertise, but the brothers knew they needed to build it out further.
Enter fellow Seattle company and computing giant Microsoft. The partnership was announced early last year.
The Robins brothers have presented to Bill Gates in the company's board room and worked with Microsoft's Peter Lee, who leads the company's healthcare strategy. And Microsoft employees are embedded within Adaptive's own office, so the two companies can "go back and forth at the local level," Robins says.
The partnership is using Microsoft's machine learning muscle to help sequence the human immune system, which rearranges in a way that makes the task more challenging.
Some of that mapping can be done with Adaptive's chemistry work, through physical experiments. Machine learning capabilities are being layered on top of that because, with "trillions" of receptors on the surface of immune cells, there's "no way we could get them all through chemistry," Robins says.
"Once we have that map built, we can go disease by disease" with applications both for treatments and diagnostic tests, Robins says. In diagnostics, Adaptive has early data in Celiac disease and ovarian cancer, though it hasn't yet said what diseases will be the first targets for its early detection test.
The end goal, and Adaptive's vision, is that one day a single blood test could diagnose many diseases, all at the same time, becoming a part of routine primary care doctor's visits each year.
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