Amgen, TScan Enter Multi-year Discovery Alliance Targeting Crohn’s Disease

Amgen and TScan Therapeutics, Inc. entered a multi-year collaboration that will use TScan’s TargetScan discovery platform to identify the antigens recognized by T cells in patients with Crohn’s disease. TScan will receive a $30 million upfront and is eligible to earn over $500 million in success-based preclinical, clinical, regulatory and commercial milestones as well as royalty payments. 
 
Amgen will evaluate a variety of modalities to create therapeutics based on targets discovered by TScan and will retain all global development and commercial rights. Amgen also has an option to expand the collaboration to ulcerative colitis, under certain terms. Each party will be responsible for its own research expenses.
 
“Anti-inflammatory drugs have traditionally been the standard of care for patients suffering from inflammatory bowel disease, but often lack efficacy and durability,” said Raymond Deshaies, Ph.D., senior vice president of Global Research at Amgen. “TScan’s platform provides a best-in-class approach to identify non-conventional drug targets to enable the development of potential first-in-class therapeutics to address unmet medical needs.”
 
“We’re excited to apply our target discovery platform to the autoimmunity space,” said Gavin MacBeath, Ph.D., acting chief executive officer and chief scientific and operating officer at TScan. “Our TargetScan platform, which we have now extended to identify MHC class II targets of CD4+ T cells, is well-suited for the discovery of antigens targeted by the immune system in inflammatory bowel disease. We look forward to developing the value of our platform both in this partnership with Amgen and in other autoimmune diseases.”