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AstraZeneca to buy Calif. cancer firm for up to $1.2B

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AstraZeneca will acquire a promising lymphoma candidate in a deal worth up to $1.2 billion. | DBT PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS

WILMINGTON โ€“ Seeking to supercharge its cancer drug pipeline, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced a deal potentially worth more than $1.2 billion to acquire a small California-based biotech firm working on lymphoma treatment.

AstraZeneca, which has its U.S. headquarters in the Wilmington suburbs, would acquire TeneoTwo, which is testing its drug TNB-486 in relapsed and refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients.

TeneoTwo was spun off from biotech firm Teneobio as a part of a $900 million acquisition by pharmaceutical giant Amgen.

AstraZeneca aims to build on the success of its leukemia drug, Calquence, which produced sales of more than $1 billion last year, officials said. The addition of TNB-486 would add another potential drug to its lineup of treatments for blood cancers.

Anas Younes, AstraZeneca’s senior vice president for hematology R&D, explained that the TeneoTwo drug redirects the bodyโ€™s natural immune response to target B-cell malignancies, binding to both the helpful and harmful cells to link them. It could be used alone or in conjunction with other therapies to improve patient outcomes.

โ€œWe believe this innovative molecule, which was designed to optimize the therapeutic window of T-cell activation, will enable us to explore novel combinations that have the potential to become new standards of care in this setting,โ€ he said.

The acquisition of TNB-486 could prove to be a challenger to Amgenโ€™s drug Blincyto, which is also a T-cell engaging antibody, according to FierceBiotech, a blog that covers the pharmaceutical industry.

The deal marks one of the first major acquisitions for the British-Swiss company since it acquired Caelum Biosciences, a small clinical-stage biotechnology company, for $150 million in October. The New Jersey-based Caelum was founded by New York-based biopharma company Fortress Biotech in 2017 to develop a monoclonal antibody for the treatment of light-chain (AL) amyloidosis, a rare abnormal protein disease.

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