Company: ADPT
Filing Date: 2025-03-03
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-030913
Chunk: 119

Company: Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp
Filing Date: 2025-03-03
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 119
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Third parties may assert that we are employing their proprietary technology without authorization. Given that clinical diagnostics and drug discovery fields are intense and highly competitive areas, there may be third-party intellectual property rights that others believe could relate to our immune medicine platform, products and services. One or more third-party patent owners or licensees may pursue or threaten to pursue litigation against us to enforce one or more patents. It would be costly and time-consuming to defend such claims. 

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Because patent applications can take many years to issue, there may be currently pending patent applications which may later result in issued patents that our current or future products, technologies and services may infringe. We cannot be certain that we have identified or addressed all potentially significant third-party patents in advance of an infringement claim being made against us. In addition, similar to what other companies in our industry have experienced, we expect our competitors and others may have patents or may in the future obtain patents and claim that making, having made, using, selling, offering to sell or importing our products or services infringes these patents. Defense of infringement and other claims, regardless of their merit, would involve substantial litigation expense and would be a substantial diversion of management and employee resources from our business. Parties making claims against us may be able to sustain the costs of complex patent litigation more effectively than we can because they have substantially greater resources. Parties making claims against us may be able to obtain injunctive or other relief, which could block our ability to develop, commercialize and sell products or services and could result in the award of substantial damages against us, including treble damages, attorneys’ fees, costs and expenses if we are found to have willfully infringed. In the event of a successful claim of infringement against us, we may be required to pay damages and ongoing royalties and obtain one or more licenses from third parties, or be prohibited from selling certain products or services. We may not be able to obtain these licenses on acceptable or commercially reasonable terms, if at all, or these licenses may be non-exclusive, which could result in our competitors gaining access to the same intellectual property. In addition, we could encounter delays in product or service introductions while we attempt to develop alternative products or services to avoid infringing third-party patents or proprietary rights. Defense of any lawsuit or failure to obtain any of these licenses could prevent us from commercializing products or services, and the prohibition of sale of any of our products or services could materially affect our business and our ability to gain market acceptance for our products or services.