In this CNBC interview, Adaptive Biotechnologies co‑founder and CEO Chad Robins discusses the company’s recent IPO (priced at $20 per share, one of the year’s largest biotech listings) and the strategic $45 million, seven‑year partnership with Microsoft. He explains Adaptive’s core technology—sequencing and mapping the receptors on T‑cells and B‑cells—to create a comprehensive “immunome” map that can be leveraged for diagnostics. The first commercial product, ClonoSEQ, measures minimal residual disease in blood cancers (leukemia, multiple myeloma) by tracking a patient’s immune‑cell genetic fingerprint after treatment to predict relapse. Robins outlines the company’s broader vision to diagnose many diseases simultaneously using the immunome, citing early work in celiac disease and ovarian cancer with a clinical signal expected by the end of the year and market‑ready products aimed for 2021. He positions Adaptive’s platform as a unique “trunk” that integrates sequencing, mapping, and informatics, differentiating it from competitors that only address individual branches such as diagnostics or drug discovery. The conversation emphasizes the need for massive computational power—provided by Microsoft’s machine‑learning tools—to solve the web‑scale problem of mapping immune receptors.
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The company Adaptive Biotechnologies aggregates data from human immune systems and uses it for disease identification and treatment. And today the company is going public in one of the biggest biotech listings of the year. The IPO priced at $20 a share. That was above its increased range, also expanded the number of shares that it's going to be issuing today. And we should also mention Microsoft has invested $45 million in this company. It's part of a 7-year partnership to push immuno— immuno innovation. Joining us ahead of today's first trade is Chad Robbins. He's the CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies. And Chad, it's great to see you.
Becky, Aaron, Joe, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for coming in. Let's talk a little bit about what the company does first and then we'll talk about the IPO and sure, and how there's stronger demand for it than had been initially expected.
Sure. Let's start with our immune system, which is amazing. Our immune system has evolved over hundreds of millions of years in response to disease. And Adaptive has created technologies that allows us to tap into this information, to read the genetics of the immune system, to create clinical products to transform how we both diagnose and treat disease.
One of those diagnosis, one of those products that you have is being able to see if someone relapses with blood cancer.
Yeah.
How does that work?
Our first clinical diagnostic is a product called Clonoseq, and that's for measuring minimal residual disease in certain blood cancers. So if a patient has one of these blood cancers such as leukemia or multiple myeloma, we're able to first determine whether the therapy worked, and then we're able to tell, at a molecular level, before a patient relapses in the clinic, whether that patient is going to relapse.
Can you tell if someone would have it to begin with, but you wouldn't use that product for everybody? Again, this would just be something that you would use specifically on people who have shown up with this disease in the past?
Yeah, so this is not a detection diagnostic. It's when a patient is diagnosed, we can determine through a genetic fingerprint that specific code in your immune system. And then we can track that code over time.
You've got a long partnership with Microsoft. They're an investor in the company. And this is something that's a little broader. You're trying to figure out how to map the entire immune system.
Indeed, this is an incredibly ambitious goal, one we're making a lot of progress on. And Microsoft has been an incredible partner. Essentially what we're doing is mapping how our bodies how we respond to disease, disease by disease. We're creating a map of the human adaptive immune system, or what we call the immunome, and then we leverage that map to diagnose disease. And the neat thing about it is we can diagnose many diseases all at the same time because instead of going one by one, disease by disease, our immune system both detects and treats all diseases in the same way. So if we can just learn how to read that information, then we can diagnose many diseases all at the same time. And yes, we're making progress in certain disease states already.
Which diseases?
We— what we've publicly announced so far is in celiac disease and ovarian cancer are two of the ones that we've started with.
And you can diagnose that right now or you're making progress on that and you expect to be able to actually do this with lots of diseases by when?
Yeah. So we're, we're expecting a clinical signal by the end of this year that we can bring into clinical validation next year and have products on the market to diagnose disease in 2021.
Obviously, that's a lot of progress and a lot of promise.
I like the Microsoft aspect of it because I don't know, the convergence is real and it's happening. It's early stages. But any cancer centers now are a lot of times like at MIT, Tyler Jackson. It's a convergence of all these different sides. I mean, tech, IT and biotechnology are going to converge. There's no other way. It's just so complicated and complex that you're going to need computer power. Really to make the advances you need, right?
Absolutely. What Microsoft is doing is they're providing their machine learning capabilities on top of Adaptive's chemistry and informatics to be able to essentially fill out this map. It's actually a problem that's a web-scale-like problem, but it's a very tractable problem. And that's where kind of Microsoft comes in. We have these specialized cells in the immune system and we're, and we're looking at how they bind to signals of disease called antigen. And we can actually start filling out this map. But Microsoft, on top of that, provides the machine learning to complete the job.
The thing that I think obviously is a ways off is the way all the different components of the immune system work in an immune response. It's not just T cells, not just B cells, not just cytokines, not just macrophages, not just— I mean, it's a cascade of that's what causes sepsis. I mean, you can't even shut it down when it happens. So it's very complex and it's certainly We're 20 years away from really understanding everything.
Yeah, I would say we're away from understanding everything, but we focus specifically on specialized cells of the immune system called T cells and B cells and on the receptor. They're on the surface. They have receptors. And we're focused on specifically understanding that receptor and that's the receptors linked to disease. And if we can do that, there's many products that we can build right now. So we're not 20 years away.
Not dealing with Huawei. Is that where you're going? He wants to make sure you know, I've been Best question for everybody who's watching at home thinking about whether to invest in this company.
Who should they comp against? Who do you think of as your competitors and what's a fair way to think about that? So, Aaron, it's a great question. So actually, at the core, we built this immune medicine platform that figures out how to sequence, map, and characterize these receptors. So think of that as a trunk of the tree. No one competes on the trunk of the tree. There's many branches in life science research and clinical diagnostics and drug discovery where, where I could specify different competitors in each one of those areas, but no one has put the whole thing together like Adaptive has.
Chad, thanks for coming in today. It's good to see you.
