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| Adaptive CEO Chad Robins |
Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies announced April 7 that it has completed two rounds of financing, netting the company $120 million that it will use to expand sales of existing products and develop new ones.
Viking Global Investors invested $5 million to cap off the company's Series C financing and added $100 million in a D round in which it was the sole financier. Adaptive CEO and founder Chad Robins told FierceMedicalDevices that the remainder of the money came from undisclosed high-net-worth individuals and a strategic investor.
One key initiative made easier by the financing is the expansion of the company's immunoSEQ research platform to enable customers to perform immunosequencing in-house. Currently, much of the research is performed in Adaptive's CLIA-certified lab, but "we're going to be building that out and distributing a kit later this year," Robins said. The kit will control for amplification bias in the reaction, the CEO said.
He called the expansion and distribution of immunoSEQ a "training ground" for more ambitious plans to someday sell diagnostic kits for clinical (as opposed to research) purposes to hospitals and physicians. This would require a 510(k) clearance or premarketing approval from the FDA.
For now, Adaptive is focusing on using the funds to expand sales of its clonoSEQ diagnostic product that monitors relapse in certain blood cancer patients, according to the April 7 statement announcing the capital infusion. The test is performed in Adaptive's CLIA-certified lab.
Robins thinks Adaptive technology can enable the incorporation of information gathered about the immune system into cancer-staging guidelines. For example, the company is developing an assay called quanTILfy that sequences white blood cells known as tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes to predict patient response to cancer-fighting immunotherapy drugs.
- here's the release