Be The Match BioTherapies and Atara Biotherapeutics have extended their collaboration to provide high-quality healthy donor cells for Atara’s off-the-shelf T-cell immunotherapy platform for patients with cancer and autoimmune diseases.
 
This multi-year partnership leverages the capabilities of Be The Match BioTherapies to source healthy donor cells from the Be The Match Registry with over 22 million genetically diverse human leukocyte antigen (HLA) immune profiles.
 
“Atara and Be The Match BioTherapies share an aspiration to serve every patient, and this partnership will allow us to deliver treatments to the patient populations that our organization was founded to help,” said Chris McClain, senior vice president, sales and business development, Be The Match BioTherapies. “We are proud to provide a consistent supply of high-quality, compliant, and consented HLA-specific starting material to support Atara’s tabelecleucel (tab-cel) program, including the ongoing Phase 3 ALLELE study, and its other pipeline candidates.”
 
Since 2016, Be The Match BioTherapies has been a strategic supplier to Atara by providing the cellular starting material, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, from healthy donors with targeted HLA haplotypes for further manufacture and cryopreservation as inventory ready to be delivered to patients in need in just a few days. Cutting-edge bioinformatic insights into HLA genetics have supported Atara’s clinical programs by ensuring that for each product, an inventory of different manufactured lots is available for partial matching to patient HLA profiles to support efficacy and safety. Be The Match BioTherapies’ regulatory expertise ensures the collection of donor cells that meet FDA and varying international regulations, broadening the potential use of the therapies.
 
Matt Yedwabnick, vice president, global supply chain, Atara, said, “With our recent EU regulatory marketing authorization application submission for tabelecleucel, the first-ever off-the-shelf allogeneic T-cell therapy to be reviewed by any regulatory agency in the world, we are one step closer to bringing this potentially transformative treatment to patients. Our ability to deliver investigational medicines, including tab-cel, is reliant on sourcing high-quality healthy donor cells. Be The Match BioTherapies’ capabilities have been instrumental in identifying and supplying the starting materials to produce our multiple allogeneic T-cell and CAR-T immunotherapies in development.