Adaptive TCR grabs $4.5M in funding

Seattle-based Adaptive TCR has completed its series A investment round, raising $4.55 million from private investors. And the company hopes to use this money to help provide scientists with a high-speed, high-resolution look into the vast diversity of T-cells of the adaptive immune system, Xconomy explains.

The developer uses a proprietary breakthrough technology to analyze T cells, a critical component of the adaptive immune's defense against infectious disease. It has developed a methodology to perform DNA sequencing of T-cell receptors at high throughput, allowing for the identification of as many as 10 million TCR sequences per sample, according to a company statement. The generated capital will fund the fee-for-service operations and R&D at the company's Seattle laboratory.

Adaptive TCR hopes that by sequencing blood samples from different individuals--and using its proprietary software--it can find some commonalities in the kinds of T-cell receptors that people form in certain situations, such as responding to a foreign pathogen like flu. If scientists could find signature proteins on T-cells at the root of these immune system irregularities, they could incorporate that knowledge into diagnostic products or use it to identify drug targets, Xconomy reports, citing Adaptive TCR.

Few scientists have tried to look at these T-cell receptors in a high-output fashion before. Indeed, fewer than 30,000 T-cell receptors had been sequenced with conventional methods before the Adaptive TCR technique came along, President and CEO Chad Robins says. "Adaptive is dedicated to providing researchers an innovative sequencing technology to allow for a deeper understanding of fundamental questions in the immune system," adds Robins in a statement.

- see Adaptive's release
- check out Xconomy's coverage