Technology Overview
Originating from over a decade of groundbreaking clinical experience at Memorial Sloan Kettering and QIMR Berghofer, Atara’s off-the-shelf, or allogeneic, T-cells are bioengineered from donors with healthy immune function and allow for rapid delivery from inventory to patients. Atara’s T-cell immunotherapies are designed to precisely recognize and target cancerous or diseased cells without affecting normal, healthy cells.
T cells are a type of white blood cell that performs several important functions in a healthy immune system. In patients with cancer and certain autoimmune conditions, the patient’s T cells are unable to effectively eliminate diseased cells.
Our off-the-shelf, allogeneic T cells are bioengineered from donors with healthy immune function and allow for rapid delivery to patients.
There are several important aspects of the technology.
Allogeneic
Our T-cells are derived from healthy donors which means that we start with cells that have healthy immune function. We then apply our technology platforms to create T-cell lines that are precision-targeted to treat specific conditions (see below for more details on precision targeting). The advantages to this approach include:
- Off-the-shelf, T-cell lines through a pre-built library of inventory; with a relatively small number of lines, the aim is to cover the majority of the population
- Efficient management of therapeutic inventory
- Prompt treatment – from the identification of need, we can deliver therapeutic T-cells to many patients in ~ 3-5 days