Atara Biotherapeutics Names Biopharmaceutical Executive Charlene Banard as Chief Technical Officer
April 05 2022 - 4:01PM
Business Wire
Atara Biotherapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATRA), a leader in T-cell
immunotherapy, leveraging its novel allogeneic EBV T-cell platform
to develop transformative therapies for patients with cancer and
autoimmune diseases, today announces biopharmaceutical executive
Charlene Banard will join as Chief Technical Officer. Charlene will
oversee process science and development, quality, manufacturing,
and supply.
“Bringing a seasoned leader like Charlene to Atara further
validates our advanced technology and its potential to transform
the lives of patients with serious diseases through our unique EBV
T-cell platform,” said Pascal Touchon, President and Chief
Executive Officer of Atara Biotherapeutics. “Charlene’s impressive
and diverse expertise in manufacturing, quality and technical
operations across many technologies and advanced therapies,
including CAR T, will be instrumental in leading our talented
Technical Operations team during this next phase of advancement of
our robust pipeline of T-cell immunotherapies.”
Ms. Banard comes to Atara from Novartis, where, as Global Head,
Technical Operations, Cell & Gene Therapy (C>) Platform,
she led C> lifecycle management strategy and execution and
established the Technical Operations strategy for the company’s
cell therapy oncology pipeline. Prior to that, she served in
multiple leadership roles at Shire across Technical Operations and
Global Quality. In these roles, Ms. Banard led the Global Quality
function with broad scope and experience in support of 12 internal
manufacturing sites and more than 70 contract manufacturing
organizations (CMOs) for 40 commercial and 40 pipeline rare disease
and specialty products. While at Shire, Ms. Banard advanced its
pipeline by securing multi-national product and facility approvals
and spearheaded data utilization to enhance efficiency of
operations. Earlier in her career, Ms. Banard held numerous roles
of increasing responsibility at Gilead Sciences, Cell Genesys, and
Chiron across Manufacturing and Development, Compliance, Quality
Assurance, Quality Control, Quality Systems, and Validation.
“I’m thrilled to join the Atara team to help deliver
differentiated, first-in-kind allogeneic EBV T-cell therapies to
patients in need. Having worked across a range of biopharmaceutical
organizations, I look forward to setting Atara’s Technical
Operations strategy and driving execution that is stage-appropriate
and scalable at this important inflection point in the Company’s
history,” said Banard. “Throughout my career, it has been my
personal mission to advance potentially transformative solutions to
address the unmet need of patients globally.”
Ms. Banard received her undergraduate degree in biochemistry
from University of California, Davis and MBA from Saint Mary’s
College of California. She was inducted into the International
Women’s Forum (IWF) Fellows Program in 2018, a multinational
organization featuring academic partnerships with Harvard Business
School and INSEAD and mentors developing talent in the
biopharmaceutical industry.
About Atara Biotherapeutics, Inc.
Atara Biotherapeutics, Inc. (@Atarabio) is a pioneer in T-cell
immunotherapy leveraging its novel allogeneic EBV T-cell platform
to develop transformative therapies for patients with serious
diseases including solid tumors, hematologic cancers and autoimmune
disease. With our lead program in Phase 3 clinical development and
currently under review to support registration in Europe, Atara is
the most advanced allogeneic T-cell immunotherapy company and
intends to rapidly deliver off-the-shelf treatments to patients
with high unmet medical need. Our platform leverages the unique
biology of EBV T cells and has the capability to treat a wide range
of EBV-associated diseases, or other serious diseases through
incorporation of engineered CARs (chimeric antigen receptors) or
TCRs (T-cell receptors). Atara is applying this one platform, which
does not require TCR or HLA gene editing, to create a robust
pipeline including: tab-cel in Phase 3 development for Epstein-Barr
virus-driven post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease (EBV+
PTLD) and other EBV-driven diseases; ATA188, a T-cell immunotherapy
targeting EBV antigens as a potential treatment for multiple
sclerosis; and multiple next-generation chimeric antigen receptor
T-cell (CAR-T) immunotherapies for both solid tumors and
hematologic malignancies. Improving patients’ lives is our mission
and we will never stop working to bring transformative therapies to
those in need. Atara is headquartered in South San Francisco and
our leading-edge research, development and manufacturing facility
is based in Thousand Oaks, California. For additional information
about the company, please visit atarabio.com and follow us on
Twitter and LinkedIn.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220404006039/en/
Investors Eric Hyllengren 805-395-9669
ehyllengren@atarabio.com
Media Alex Chapman 805-456-4772 achapman@atarabio.com
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