Teneobio falls short of Amgen’s expectations

Today’s discontinuation of AMG 340 doesn’t make Amgen’s 2021 takeover of Teneobio look great. Amgen had bought Teneobio, a subsidiary of a private business focusing on heavy chain-only antibodies, for $993m up front, and AMG 340, a T-cell engager against PSMA that was then coded TNB-585, was the acquisition’s lead asset. But today the company said all work on AMG 340, primarily focused on a phase 1 dose-escalation study in metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer, would cease, resulting in a $650m impairment. Several Teneobio-originated assets remain in Amgen’s portfolio, though none has apparently moved beyond the preclinical stage. The Teneo stable delivered other deals, with an anti-CD22 asset licensed to Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca picking up AZD0486, targeting CD19. AbbVie licensed Teneo’s ABBV-383, and this remains a key focus of that group’s anti-BCMA strategy. Teneo’s idea was to design T-cell engaging MAbs that are fully human, with a tumour antigen-targeting domain made up of just a heavy chain, the idea being to eliminate the need to pair a light chain with its desired heavy chain, as it the case in typical MAbs. The bull case is that whatever problems Amgen encountered were specific to AMG 340.

How the Teneo business was carved up

Source: company filings & scientific papers.