A Delaware jury found Amgen and its Teneobio subsidiary knowingly used Harbour Antibodies' transgenic mice, which produce heavy chain only antibodies, the building blocks for some modern cancer drugs. A separate patent appeal could push damages ten times higher.
A federal jury in Delaware found that Amgen and its Teneobio subsidiary willfully infringed a Harbour Antibodies patent on transgenic mice, the engineered animals used to discover heavy chain-only antibodies that have become a building block for next-generation cancer drugs. The jury awarded $20.2 million in damages, but because the infringement was found willful, a judge has the authority to triple that figure to roughly $60.6 million.
The verdict, handed down in a case Harbour BioMed filed in late 2021, puts a price tag on the platform-level intellectual property hidden inside Amgen's $2.5 billion acquisition of Teneobio. Harbour Antibodies, a Dutch subsidiary of the Chinese biotech Harbour BioMed, makes mice whose immune systems produce heavy chain-only antibodies—a smaller, simpler class of proteins well suited to bispecific drugs that hit two disease targets at once. Amgen's Teneobio was built around a similar approach, and Harbour argued in court that it had tried to license the platform to Teneobio back in 2017 and was turned away.
The willful finding is the substantive news. A jury's "willful" label signals that it did not credit Amgen's defense, that the company knew it was using protected technology, and that the court can now layer additional damages on top of the verdict. Harbour BioMed itself flagged the trebling risk in a June 14 release and noted that the same Delaware court is also weighing a separate patent, U.S. Patent No. 10,906,970, that could in theory support damages "up to ten times" what the jury just awarded, according to the Fierce Biotech report on the verdict.
Amgen, for its part, kept the door open to a fight. A company spokesperson said Amgen would "pursue certain important legal issues with the court in post-trial proceedings," language that is consistent with a motion for judgment as a matter of law or a new trial, and leaves the formal appeal question open. Either way, the $20.2 million is a floor, not a ceiling, and Amgen will be defending more than a single patent number.
For a company with a market capitalization above $150 billion, the dollar number is real but not existential. The story is what the verdict reveals about how Amgen sized up a $2.5 billion acquisition whose value depended on a platform that may have been encumbered from the start. Harbour Antibodies sold into the build-versus-license question at the heart of biotech M&A: when a major drugmaker buys a smaller antibody engine, who carries the cost if a foundational patent later turns out to be in the way.
The next move is procedural. The judge will rule on willfulness and on any post-trial motions from Amgen, and the Federal Circuit appeal on the second patent will set the longer-term ceiling. For now, the jury has said the infringement was not a close call. The platform, not the check, is the story.