T-cell data as important as antibodies in fighting Covid-19: Biotech CEO

Chad Robins, Adaptive Biotechnologies Co-founder & CEO discusses, with Yahoo Finance, the company's Q2 earnings and future growth.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Want to talk to you the latest right now regarding this search for a COVID-19 vaccine but not necessarily the vaccine but the test protocol around it and how we find out if this thing is accurate. Chad Robins is the CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies, and he is joining us now live from Seattle, Washington. Good to have you here. And I wanted to ask a very simple question because it's not that you-- or perhaps you do-- make the vaccine, but you make the computer software that helps a company actually track whether the T-cell count is responding? Help me understand what you do.

CHAD ROBINS: Sure, Adam. And first, thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it. Actually, let's start with the immune system, and then we can put that into context of what we do. There are-- your immune system has very specialized type of cells in your adaptive immune system called T-cells and B-cells that essentially act as scanners and scan your body and look for different pieces of disease. And once they got a-- that lock and key, once that barcode scanner finds the disease, the same scanner essentially springs into action and goes and kills the disease, OK?

And So what we do is actually chemistry, software, and machine learning that allows us essentially to read and translate the immune system to develop diagnostics so that we can learn how to read the immune system, just like the immune system diagnosis disease naturally. And in addition, we also are harnessing the power of the immune system to kill the disease. So we've got programs going on in both of those different areas.

JULIE HYMAN: Chad, it's Julie here. So effectively, it's immunology, correct? It would fall under that broad umbrella. So talk to me about where you have found success. Because I know you're doing some developmental work around the coronavirus, but you're working on a lot of other things as well. So what have you brought to market, and what has worked with these kinds of approaches?

CHAD ROBINS: Yes, hi, Julie. It's an immune medicine platform where we-- our first success in commercial product is a product called ClonoSEQ for monitoring minimal residual disease in certain blood cancers. Essentially, we can count the specific number of cancer cells left in the body after treatment and then monitor that exact count over time to provide a clinician that information so that they can incorporate that into their treatment paradigm.

Separately, we partnered with Microsoft to essentially map the immune response to many different diseases, and that's exactly what we did. We pointed-- this machinery that we built three years ago, we pointed that directly at COVID-19. So we can look at the specific T-cell signature that maps to the specific parts of-- in this case, for COVID, the parts of the virus. And as Adam asked as well, what we're doing with that for vaccine developers is showing-- it's being incorporated into their clinical trials to determine if they have an effective vaccine.

AKIKO FUJITA: Chad, when you talk about mapping the immune response, can you can you talk about what kind of challenges the coronavirus specifically presents? I mean, we've heard a lot about how it has evolved, how it has mutated, and why we're seeing sort of, for example, younger patients get it now. Can you talk about the shift that you've seen and how that presents a big challenge for somebody like you?

CHAD ROBINS: Yeah, so the-- what's happening is your immune system actually sees coronavirus like it would any other disease. So this is actually just a big data problem and being able to track that data problem over time. So as we get more-- we're running, actually, one of the largest global diagnostic trials in the world right now that currently it's called the Immune Code Program.

We have the immune rate study, and then we're collecting data into the Immune Code database that we're making publicly available. And as we accrue more and more patients into this study, we're able to look for those and answer those exact type of questions of what your immune system is seeing, how the virus is mutating over time, what kind of pieces of the virus your immune system sees. And then we can answer very key questions, such as post-infection immunity, whether you have potentially pre-existing immunity to the virus, whether your immune system is seeing other coronaviruses other than just COVID-19. These are all the questions that our technology should be able to answer.

ADAM SHAPIRO: And Chad, we should point out, you reported earnings after the bell yesterday. You beat on revenue, $21 million. Stock is trading a little bit higher as we're talking right now. I apologize that we've centered mostly on COVID-19 because I know that you're involved in other kinds of issues. But since we're on COVID-19, I want to wrap up by asking you, from the companies that you're working with, what are you seeing? We hear from Fauci, cautiously optimistic. Are you getting feedback data that would indicate that any of these companies developing vaccines are on the right track and that you're seeing that in the software you provide?

CHAD ROBINS: Yeah, so one of the things that we're seeing-- and this isn't just Adaptive-- but the vaccine trials and the global research community right now has recognized that the antibody response isn't enough, that you need to be looking at the T-cell response to the disease. However, there's never been a standardized methodology that was able to do that in the past that just required a couple of milliliters of whole blood.

So right now, we're in discussions across the various stages of the vaccines. And we just launched a product, but we should hopefully be in a position to answer that question soon. But what we do know, from even the lower throughput, cruder methodologies is that the T-cell response to the vaccine is critically important and it must be incorporated to show durability of response to the vaccine and persistence.