We are powering the age of immune medicine–you can too. At Adaptive, our goal is to harness the power of the adaptive immune system to make a difference in the lives of people living with many different diseases. As an Adapter, you will be surrounded by driven colleagues who think boldly and innovate fearlessly. You will experience meaningful challenges in your work and be fueled by the knowledge that you're making a difference in patient's lives. You belong here – come discover your story at Adaptive.

Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business. These and other AI technologies are about to multiply, and we look at how organizations can best take advantage of them. Think of your immune response as a giant machine-learning problem, with your body as the computer. Immune cells travel around your body, sampling all sorts of matter they come into contact with, from your own cells to the cells of organisms that definitely shouldn't be there. If immune cells encounter something they know shouldn't part of your body -- bacteria or a virus, say -- the body scales up the cells that know how to deal with that interloper.

Healthcare is an industry that touches all of us, given the most basic of human goals: we all want to lead healthy lives. Last year we embarked on Healthcare NExT, a Microsoft initiative which aims to accelerate healthcare innovation through artificial intelligence and cloud computing. By working side-by-side with the healthcare industry's most pioneering players, we are bringing Microsoft's capabilities in groundbreaking research and product development to help healthcare providers, biotech companies and organizations around the world use artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud to innovate. It's exciting work with unique challenges, and in the lead-up to next week's Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, we're announcing a number of solutions, projects and AI accelerators that we believe will help make intelligent health possible, with more details below: We will also continue progress on current Healthcare NExT research-based projects like our Health Bot project as well as our partnerships with UPMC and Adaptive Biotechnologies. Several themes emerge at the convergence of healthcare and technology.

Microsoft has teamed up with Seattle-based sequencing company Adaptive Biotechnologies to map the genetics of the human immune system. The work aims to aid the early detection of diseases, particularly cancer, allowing them to be more effectively treated. The IT giant will bring machine learning and cloud computing capabilities, with Adaptive contributing its immune sequencing technologies. The deal, which will see Microsoft invest in Adaptive, falls within the firm's Healthcare NExT initiative which was launched last year to accelerate healthcare innovation by applying artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Peter Lee, corporate VP, AI and research at Microsoft, said: "We are very excited and inspired by our collaboration with Adaptive Biotechnologies, as it clearly advances our mission to use cloud and AI technologies to transform healthcare and improve the lives of people around the world.

Microsoft has joined forces with Adaptive Biotechnologies, a Seattle-based biotech company, to map the human immune system, according to a Jan. 4 Microsoft blog post by Peter Lee, PhD, the company's corporate vice president of artificial intelligence and research. Under the partnership, researchers at Microsoft will leverage the company's machine learning and cloud computing capabilities to analyze Adaptive Biotechnologies' high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics data on T-cell and B-cell receptors, which make up the immune system. From there, the companies will develop a "universal T-cell receptor/antigen map" to detect disease. "Together, we have a goal that is simple to state but also incredibly ambitious: create a universal blood test that reads a person's immune system to detect a wide variety of diseases including infections, cancers and autoimmune disorders in their earliest stage, when they can be most effectively diagnosed and treated," Dr. Lee wrote. The blood test would not only enable researchers to determine an individual's exposure to a particular disease, but also help personalize treatments based on their immunological history, including what diseases they have overcome in the past.

Microsoft and Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies have announced a new partnership which aims to use artificial intelligence in order to decode the immune system and thus better understand, prevent, and treat disease. In essence, the body's immune response is controlled mostly by two types of cells: B-cells (which originate in the bone marrow) and T-cells (which mature in and derive their name from an organ called the thymus). On the surface, each of these has a large number of proteins that act as receptors and are dubbed either BCRs (B-cell receptors) or TCRs (T-cell receptors). This is important to note due to the fact that BCRs are more thoroughly understood than TCRs, with the sequencing of the latter still in its early stages. T-cells and by extension TCRs play quite a big role in the proper function of your acquired immune response, in particular working with a series of proteins which form the major histocompatibility complex (MHC).