Year: 2019-20

Company: Atara Bio

Liaison(s): Jeff Ketelhut, Daniel Lee, Judy McHugh

Atara Biotherapeutics is a leading off-the-shelf, allogeneic T-cell immunotherapy company that is developing novel treatments for patients with severe and life-threatening diseases like cancer, autoimmune, and viral diseases. Founded in 2012, Atara is a development-stage company with a unique platform to create off-the-shelf allogeneic T-cell therapies. Currently, its main locations are in South San Francisco, CA (Corporate Headquarters), and Thousand Oaks, CA (R&D and manufacturing site).

As an organization develops from a small start-up to a large corporation, the importance of correctly recording, managing, and governing data becomes increasingly paramount. It is critical to address these procedures because proper management of master data can enhance GMP compliance. Currently, Atara is looking into improving their already functional data flow and governance within and between the systems used by different departments.

Therefore, the team’s objectives for this project are to gather data from different systems used in-house through interviews with subject matter experts, recognize the master data present in the different systems, bridge information gaps between systems, and identify the current system’s processes and governance body. Ultimately, after analyzing the data obtained, the team will attempt to utilize in-house capabilities to propose a solution for Atara’s data management and governance development.