Adaptive Biotechnologies Corporation announced two non-exclusive agreements with Pfizer Inc to leverage Adaptive’s proprietary T-Cell Receptor (TCR) 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 utilise Adaptive’s immune medicine platform to identify disease-causing TCRs as potential therapeutic targets in Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). 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 Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models to accelerate research and drug discovery in multiple disease areas.

“Using our AI-enabled immune medicine platform, Adaptive has amassed a treasure trove of immune receptor data along with an enhanced understanding of T-cell biology. This deep and well-characterised immune system data has the potential to inform discoveries across immunology programmes that may lead to next-generation therapeutics in RA,” said Chad Robins, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Adaptive Biotechnologies.

Under the RA agreement, Adaptive will lead target discovery activities to identify disease-specific RA TCRs. Pfizer will be responsible for all development, and commercialisation 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 USD 890 million.

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.