Amgen’s up-to-$2.5 billion acquisition of the antibody specialist Teneobio is costing the California drugmaker once again.
A federal jury in Delaware has found that Amgen and Teneobio willfully infringed on an antibody patent held by Harbour Antibodies, a Dutch subsidiary of China’s Harbour BioMed.
Alongside the verdict, the jury decided that Amgen must pay Harbour $20.2 million in damages. Given that the infringement has been deemed willful, the judge may triple the actual compensation awarded, bringing the total to $60.6 million, Harbour noted in a June 14 release.
In a statement to Fierce, an Amgen spokesperson said the company will pursue “certain important legal issues with the court in post-trial proceedings.”
Harbour sued Amgen in late 2021, shortly after the latter paid $900 million upfront and committed up to $1.6 billion in milestone payments to snap up Teneobio. Harbour BioMed obtained Harbour Antibodies and its transgenic mouse platforms for antibody discoveries back in 2016.
In its lawsuit, Harbour claimed that Teneobio’s UniRat discovery platform was “modeled after” its Harbour Mice, which can produce heavy chain-only antibodies, according to a December 2021 complaint. As Harbour noted, heavy chain-only constructs are smaller in size than traditional antibodies and are more suitable for designing bispecific or multi-specific antibodies, allowing binding to epitopes that conventional monoclinal antibodies cannot access.
Noticing the alleged infringement, Harbour says it first reached out to Teneobio management in 2017 to talk about potential licensing terms, but this outreach was rejected.
According to Harbour’s June 14 release, the Delaware court had previously ruled against Harbour on one patent, prompting the company to initially focus on its U.S. Patent No. 10,906,970, which was part of an invention made by Frank Grosveld, a founder of Harbour Antibodies.
Harbour is simultaneously appealing the other decision to the Federal Circuit. That patent carries “substantially greater financial implications—potentially representing up to ten times the damages awarded in this case,” the company noted.
Meanwhile, the Teneobio buyout didn’t exactly pan out as Amgen had expected. In 2023, Amgen took a $650 million impairment charge tied to the termination of a PSMAxCD3 bispecific coded AMG 340 (TNB-585), the lead candidate from the Teneobio portfolio.
Amgen is instead advancing xaluritamig, a potential first-in-class STEAP1-directed bispecific T-cell engager, with two phase 3 trials now in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.
Meanwhile, Harbour’s antibody platform has attracted several collaborators. In December, Bristol Myers Squibb signed on with a multiyear research deal focused on multi-specific antibody discoveries. Counting potential milestones, the deal could eventually be worth up to $1.1 billion.