Synopsis:

Harlan Robins, Ph.D., is the CSO and Co-Founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies, a pioneer and leader in immune-driven medicine that aims to improve people’s lives by learning from the wisdom of their adaptive immune systems. Adaptive’s proprietary immune profiling platform reveals and translates insights from our adaptive immune systems with unprecedented scale and precision. Harlan discusses how he navigated the ups and downs of co-founding a company. He talks about the adaptive immune system, why it’s important, and what Adaptive is currently working on from a development perspective. He also discusses Adaptive’s partnership with Genentech to create personalized cancer therapies.

Biography:

Dr. Harlan Robins is the Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies, a commercial-stage biotech company that aims to translate the genetics of the adaptive immune system into clinical products to diagnose and treat disease.

Prior to co-founding Adaptive, Harlan served in various roles at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in the Computational Biology Program, including Assistant Faculty Member, Associate, and Full Member and Head of the program.

Harlan holds a BS in Physics from Harvard University and a master’s degree and PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, with a visiting appointment to the California Institute of Technology. Harlan received postdoctoral appointments in the particle theory group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Interested in the mathematics behind genetics and observing the potential utility of high-level mathematics to study problems in the biological sciences, Harlan took another postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton under famed biologist Dr. Arnold Levine. With Dr. Levine, he concentrated on developing bioinformatic algorithms for micro RNA targets and bacterial genome analysis, a precursor to his faculty appointment at FHCRC in the Computational Biology Group, Public Health Sciences and Human Biology Divisions.