The aducanumab theory of Novartis v. Amgen

Last week, Amgen and Novartis got into a legal dispute over their partnership on Aimovig, a treatment for migraine. The crux was a 2018 agreement between Novartis’s generics business and a third company developing a migraine therapy of its own. Amgen claims that agreement was a breach of contract and, on April 2, sent Novartis a notice of termination.

But what if Amgen’s move has less to do with migraine and more to do with Alzheimer’s disease?

As EvercoreISI analyst Umer Raffat points out, the Novartis-Amgen alliance went beyond Aimovig and also included splitting the rights to Novartis's late-stage Alzheimer’s drug, one that, like Biogen’s aducanumab, relies on the idea that targeting plaques called beta-amyloid can treat the disease.

And that’s where the timeline is interesting, Raffat notes. Amgen found about Novartis’s out-of-wedlock migraine partnership in September, and Novartis effectively terminated it in January. But it wasn’t until April — two weeks after aducanumab failed — that Amgen moved to terminate its agreement with Novartis. That suggests Amgen’s motivations could be two-fold: keeping any Aimovig profits for itself and cutting ties with the amyloid hypothesis.

Amgen didn’t respond to a request for comment.