NEW YORK - Adaptive Biotechnologies said on Wednesday that it is cutting its workforce as part of a previously announced restructuring that will create two business arms, Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) and Immune Medicine, to drive future growth.
As a result of the restructuring, the Seattle-based company will let go of about 12 percent of its employees, downsizing the number of full-time staff to roughly 750 from 858 as of the end of 2021. The company also said it will "deprioritize projects and programs that are no longer aligned with the goals of the two business areas."
"While it is difficult to part ways with valuable team members who have made important contributions to Adaptive, we are at an inflection point in a rapidly evolving industry and workplace and believe these changes will put us in a stronger position to deliver on our mission and vision," Adaptive CEO Chad Robins said in a statement. "I am confident this reorganization and new leadership in place will set Adaptive up for breakthrough growth in 2022 and beyond."
"We performed a comprehensive review of all departments across the company in conjunction with the ongoing reorganization of the business," Robins said in a blog post to employees published on the company's website on Tuesday. "It became clear that we had to cut operating expenses, deprioritize certain projects and programs, and make significant adjustments to expenditures on capital projects. This decision was a last resort after considering all these alternatives."
After the personnel reshuffling, Adaptive said the company's MRD business branch, which offers the company's ClonoSeq diagnostic test to clinicians and the ClonoSeq assay to its pharmaceutical partners for drug development and approvals, will be led by Nitin Sood, who joined Adaptive in 2021 from Guardant Health. Meanwhile, the firm's Immune Medicine business, which houses the firm's T-cell mapping efforts, in partnership with Microsoft, and the T-Detect assay franchise, will be led by Sharon Benzeno, who most recently was responsible for Adaptive's business development and drug discovery.
Additionally, Adaptive appointed Tycho Peterson as the company's new CFO. Before joining Adaptive, Peterson spent 23 years working at JP Morgan Chase, where he served as managing director of life science tools and diagnostics in the healthcare group.