Diego Miralles, president of Adaptive Therapeutics.
Diego Miralles.

Adaptive Biotechnologies, the heavily-funded Seattle bioinformatics company, today announced that Diego Miralles will become the president of a new division of the company called Adaptive Therapeutics.

Miralles will work to build out the new division and will lead its efforts to use Adaptive Biotechnologies’ discoveries around pairing the alpha and beta chains of T-cell receptors to develop and commercialize patient immunotherapies.

As part of his role in Adaptive Therapeutics, Miralles will also help the company explore potential pharmaceutical partnerships in the future if Adaptive does not develop its immunotherapies in-house.

Prior to joining Adaptive, Miralles worked at Johnson & Johnson as its global head of innovation.

He founded Johnson & Johnson’s JLABS incubator in 2012 for entrepreneurs in healthcare and life sciences and helped to launch the Johnson & Johnson’s innovation center in 2013. Miralles attended medical school in Buenos Aires, Argentina and went on to work as a professor at Duke and the University of California San Diego, where he is currently an adjunct professor in the department of pharmacology. His research has focused primarily on infectious diseases, particularly HIV. 

For now, Morales will be based out of San Diego since he teaches at the university, but his home office will be Adaptive’s Seattle office, the company said.

“Diego has an extensive scientific and pharmaceutical background and a strong reputation in leading and developing innovative drugs and businesses,” said Co-founder, President, and CEO of Adaptive Biotechnologies Chad Robins in a news release. “We are looking forward to his experienced insight and strong leadership as he builds clinically impactful therapeutic programs for Adaptive.”

Adaptive Biotechnologies has two other divisions, one for research and one for diagnostics, in addition to the new therapeutics division. The company currently employs 200, up from 170 last May.

It has raised just over $400 million and in May of last year, raised a Series F round of a little over $195 million from lead investors Viking and Matrix Capital to work on T-cell and B-cell sequencing. The company tapped former Zillow CFO Chad Cohen as CFO last year.

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