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Atara Biotherapeutics Names Biopharmaceutical Executive Charlene Banard as Chief Technical Officer
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Atara Biotherapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATRA), a leader in T-cell immunotherapy, leveraging its novel allogeneic
About this update from Atara Biotherapeutics, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":" SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nAtara 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.\n\n“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.”\n\nMs. 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.\n\n“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 loo...