Fujifilm expands in US after $100M deal for Atara's manufacturing site and employees
Atara Biotherapeutics has worked on advancing its allogeneic T-cell therapy platform for patients with cancer and autoimmune disease for years, with much of the focus on the ever-tricky task of manufacturing such a therapy. On Wednesday, the company announced a deal to hand its California manufacturing site over to Fujifilm Diosynth in exchange for $100 million upfront and a long-term licensing deal.
Fujifilm will give Atara access to flexible capacity and specific capabilities needed to manufacture clinical and commercial-stage allogeneic cell therapies. That includes tab-cel, an off-the-shelf, allogeneic investigational therapy for the treatment of Epstein-Barr virus-driven post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease. Currently, there are no approved treatments available for the disease, which is a virus that can affect patients after solid organ or allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation.

In exchange, the CDMO behemoth gets 140 skilled staff members at the Thousand Oaks site. It’s a deal that made sense, in large part, because allogeneic therapies don’t require the need for full capacity all the time or the ability to quickly scale up at a moment’s notice, Atara CEO Pascal Touchon said in an interview with Endpoints News. When the company first built the facility, control over the entire facility was a key goal. But what they’ve discovered after having a ton of success in scaling the number of doses per batch is that the company doesn’t need full capacity all the time, especially in-house. And since Atara developed the process, it can easily tech transfer the process to anyone.
“It’s completely off the shelf, which means we have an inventory of product, like a monoclonal antibody,” he said. “When we receive a particular request from a patient … we just need to find the right product for the right patient within our inventory, and we do that in three days.”
Epstein-Barr is the virus that causes mononucleosis. Atara has submitted Phase III trial data to the EU for regulatory review, and plans to submit data to the FDA for a BLA by Q2 of this year. Its pipeline also includes ATA188 for multiple sclerosis and CAR T-cell therapies ATA3271 and ATA3219.
Eleven of the 19 responders in the Phase III ALLELE trial saw a duration of response longer than six months, Atara said. Of the eight remaining responders, four patients experienced either disease progression or death, and four weren’t evaluable for a six-month response at the data cut. There were no treatment-related deaths, according to CMO AJ Joshi. Overall response rate, which was the primary endpoint of the study, was 50% in 38 patients with EBV PTLD with relapsed or refractory responses to rituximab and chemotherapy were treated.

The site has 90,000 square feet set to support both clinical and commercial operations, and it can expand to support other products as well. The acquisition also helps Fujifilm expand its footprint in the US, CEO Martin Meeson said in a statement. Just in the fall, the company broke ground on a new headquarters in North Carolina, a project that is estimated to cost $2 billion.
“This agreement we believe it’s probably the way forward,” Touchon said. “I strongly believe that the future of allogeneic cell therapy is going to be like it was for monoclonal antibodies 20-30 years ago. When you control the manufacturing process, the more you can leverage other companies, the more you increase your manufacturing productivity.”