Adaptive Biotechnologies Acquires Sequenta, Could Disrupt Disease Detection

By Jof Enriquez,
Follow me on Twitter @jofenriq

Adaptive Biotechnologies Corporation is buying Sequenta Inc. for an undisclosed sum to create a new company that uses powerful immunosequencing techniques to diagnose and fight cancer, infectious diseases, and autoimmune disorders.

“Our mission is to change the course of medicine through sequencing a patient’s adaptive immune system. Over the past few months it has become increasingly clear that joining forces with Sequenta would accelerate our ability to make the promise of immunosequencing a reality for physicians and patients,” said Chad Robins, CEO of Adaptive, in a recent statement. “By combining our resources, we can increase the number of clinical trials we are able to run to validate clinical applications of immunosequencing, and explore new and innovative research and development initiatives that neither of us would have been able to do alone.”

Adaptive has developed next generation sequencing (NGS) tools to profile T-cell and B-cell receptors, while Sequenta has concentrated on using similar tools to monitor minimal residual disease (MRD) for patients with blood cancers. The combined company will initially focus on detecting MRD.

“We believe immunosequencing represents a more sensitive and accurate alternative to the current standard of care used to detect MRD in patients with blood cancers, including flow cytometry. Together, we can accelerate the adoption of this technology in clinical practice and in clinical trials for revolutionary new therapies that use MRD to determine patient specific care paradigms,” said Dr. Tom Willis, co-founder of Sequenta, in the statement.

Willis, along with Sequenta’s other co-founder Malek Faham, will join Adaptive’s senior leadership team. The new company’s leadership team will report to Robins, who will remain CEO of the combined company, according to the statement.

According to Forbes’ Luke Timmerman, Adaptive and Sequenta both use high-powered DNA sequencing machines and computers to detect the “reshuffling” of DNA that happens as a person’s immune system adapts to treatment. This means that clinicians using the technology can tweak a treatment depending on a patient’s response, or shift to other, more precise therapies.

Immunosequencing technology can also identify which individuals will benefit from taking experimental drugs made by pharmaceutical firms. Adaptive’s list of existing customers already includes major drug companies like AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, Pfizer, and Juno Therapeutics, according to Timmerman.

The new company plans to invest in more clinical trials to become a major player in genome-based clinical diagnostics, Sequenta’s chairman John Stuelpnagel said in the Forbes article.

“What we’re doing is very innovative, and [the deal] is a recognition that immune sequencing is incredibly important, and will be incredibly important, for lots of indications. To fully capitalize on it, we really need scale,” Stuelpnagel said in the article. “These organizations are great complements, and putting them together helps us get to the scale we need.”

Immunosequencing has the potential to advance personalized medicine because of the important role the immune system plays in many diseases. The technology ‒ which uses powerful NGS devices ‒ received a boost recently, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the marketing of four types of such devices. Using these diagnostic devices could one day become part of a routine doctor’s visit.