TScan to Receive $30 Million Upfront With Potential Development and Commercial Milestone Payments of Over $500 Million.
Collaboration Brings Together TScan’s Proprietary Target Discovery Platform and Amgen’s Inflammation Therapeutic Expertise and Research Capabilities

Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) and TScan Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: TCRX) today announced a multi-year collaboration that will use TScan’s proprietary target discovery platform, TargetScan, to identify the antigens recognized by T cells in patients with Crohn’s disease.
All things considered, this is among one of the largest deals you’ll see for a micro-cap biopharma company. As many of you know, companies in this sector of this size and scale are typically not profitable – mainly focusing on R&D until their drug or technology is fully approved/commercially viable.
The critical thing to note with this deal between TScan and Amgen is that the cash milestones ensure a cash runway for TCRX, potentially even until they become commercially viable and profitable.
Here’s a breakdown of the press release in layman’s terms, so anyone without background or knowledge in this space can better understand:
Amgen and TScan Therapeutics are teaming up to find new treatments for Crohn’s disease, a chronic condition that causes inflammation in the gut. TScan has a unique platform called TargetScan that can identify the proteins recognized by the immune system in people with the disease. Amgen will use this information to create new drugs to treat Crohn’s disease.
As part of the deal, TScan will get an upfront payment of $30 million from Amgen and could earn more than $500 million if the collaboration is successful. Amgen will have the rights to develop and sell any new drugs from this partnership.
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Both companies will be responsible for their research costs, and Amgen can expand the collaboration to include another condition called ulcerative colitis. This partnership could lead to new and better treatments for people with Crohn’s disease, who currently have limited options for managing their symptoms.
Here are a couple of blurbs from the management team:
“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.”
What’s retail saying?
As per usual, with gains of around 135%, you can probably guess that retail is all over it. Investors practically all over the internet keep their eye on the stock for potential entry points utilizing various day trading techniques.
Interestingly, some traders are surprised it managed to trade such massive volumes early intraday. If you look at their chart from the prior months, the average volume was relatively minuscule – sometimes trading as low as 5K shares a day. Compared to the ~27M shares traded at the time of writing, that’s a massive shift.
We will update you on TCRX when more details emerge, so make sure you are subscribed to Microcapdaily to know what’s happening with TCRX.
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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay