Adaptive Biotechnologies Partners with Pfizer, Potential Value Up to $890M

Adaptive Biotechnologies (ADPT) announced two non-exclusive agreements with Pfizer (PFE) to leverage Adaptive's proprietary T-cell receptor discovery capabilities and large-scale immune receptor antigen mapping data. Adaptive has identified autoreactive or 'offender' TCRs that could potentially cause disease in patients with autoimmune indications. Pfizer will utilize Adaptive's immune medicine platform to identify disease-causing TCRs as potential therapeutic targets in rheumatoid arthritis. Under this agreement, Adaptive will apply its platform to Pfizer's clinical samples to identify the subset of common TCRs that are significantly enriched in RA patients. Pfizer will use these data to accelerate its research and development of potential therapeutic candidates for RA. Adaptive has generated what it believes is the largest and highest quality TCR-antigen binding dataset relative to what is publicly available. Under this agreement, Pfizer has licensed certain Adaptive TCR-antigen data for its use in developing and training Pfizer's AI and machine learning models to accelerate research and drug discovery in multiple disease areas. Under the RA agreement, Adaptive will lead target discovery activities to identify disease-specific RA TCRs. Pfizer will be responsible for all development, and commercialization of therapies identified using Adaptive's target discovery work. Adaptive will receive an upfront payment and may be eligible to receive additional, potential data delivery, development, commercial and sales milestones that could total up to about $890M. Under the TCR-antigen data licensing agreement, Adaptive will receive an upfront payment and additional future potential annual licensing fees under this non-exclusive, multi-year data access agreement. Specific financial terms of the agreement will not be disclosed.