After Raising $105 Million, Adaptive Therapeutics Looks To Hire 60 To 70 New Employees
October 10, 2014
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
“We want to be the Facebook or Google of recruiting in biotech,” said Adaptive CEO Chad Robins in a statement.
Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies announced it is planning to hire 60 to 70 new people this year. The company, spun off from the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, earlier this year raised $105 million in funding from Viking Global Investors.
The company indicated it would use the money to expand worldwide. Adaptive utilizes a patent-pending technology that employs high-throughput sequencing and computer infrastructure to analyze T-cell receptors, major components of the immune system. The tech allows scientists to identify and analyze the exact structure and makeup of 10 to 15 million unique T-cell receptors in a single individual. Traditional techniques are only able to analyze and catalog about 30,000.
The hiring is part of an overall office and company expansion. The office expansion will also include an automated robotics facility for next-generation genetic sequencing. The company plans to form a scientific advisory board made up of researchers from the U.S. and Italy, including Fred Hutchison, the Mayo Clinic, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and other universities and health care centers.
Adaptive recently brought on Brian Hansen as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). Most recently Hansen was at Genoptix, a company owned by Novartis that develops and commercializes diagnostic tests. Before that, Hansen was senior vice president of Global Sales and Service.
“Brian has a proven track record as a commercial leader in the diagnostics industry, having grown both the Genoptix and Gen-Probe commercial organizations,” said Robins in a press release. “The addition of an established oncology diagnostics veteran is highly advantageous as Adaptive shifts focus from research to the commercialization of clinical diagnostics, particularly in hematology and oncology, where Mr. Hansen has such deep relevant experience.”
The product the company is focused on commercializing is clonoSEQ, a clinical diagnostics test for measuring Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) in blood cancers. In June 2014 researchers with Adaptive and the University of Washington published a study in Clinical Cancer Research that demonstrated enhanced accuracy and sensitivity in identifying potential relapse in patients with B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (B-ALL) utilizing clonoSEQ. The study looked at 99 children with B-ALL and used Adaptive’s clonoSEQ assay and UW’s flow cytometry to identify the primary cancer clone in pre-treatment bone marrow samples. The clonoSEQ assay identified MRD in 28 cases that were missed by flow cytometry.