A Salt Lake City-based biotech start­up is jump­ing on board the an­ti­body train — and it’s equip­ping it­self for the jour­ney ahead with a round of VC fi­nanc­ing.

Sor­riso Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals an­nounced this morn­ing that it closed a Se­ries A worth $31 mil­lion in a round co-led by Ar­ix Bio­science and New En­ter­prise As­so­ci­ates. Sor­riso’s new fund­ing will ad­vance the biotech’s oral an­ti­body pipeline — specif­i­cal­ly its lead can­di­date through pre­clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment, ac­cord­ing to a Sor­riso state­ment.

Ar­ix com­mit­ted $13 mil­lion as part of the fi­nanc­ing, in ex­change for a 26% stake on a ful­ly di­lut­ed ba­sis.

Sor­riso pres­i­dent and CEO Cia­ra Kennedy told End­points News that the funds have a two-year run­way, which will be enough time to get their lead drug — an an­ti­body called SOR102 that tar­gets TN­Fa and IL-23 for in­flam­ma­to­ry bow­el dis­ease — through Phase I tri­als and get every­thing ready for start­ing Phase II. And as far as the time­line goes, Phase I tri­als will start lat­er next year as Sor­riso is cur­rent­ly in the mid­dle of IND-en­abling work, Kennedy told End­points.

Sor­riso, found­ed last year by Su­san Dubé, fo­cus­es on an­ti­body treat­ments for oth­er in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­eases in­clud­ing Crohn’s dis­ease and ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis, ac­cord­ing to the biotech. Their tech­nol­o­gy, Kennedy said, is an an­ti­body plat­form that Sor­riso li­censed from UK an­ti­body biotech VH­squared, which was fi­nal­ized ear­li­er this year.

Dubé, who al­so serves as Sor­riso’s CFO, spent over four years at Am­plyx Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, a for­mer port­fo­lio com­pa­ny of Ar­ix Bio­science be­fore Am­plyx was bought out by Pfiz­er ear­li­er this year. She worked her way up to VP of cor­po­rate de­vel­op­ment be­fore leav­ing in Jan­u­ary 2020 — and start­ing up Sor­riso a few months lat­er.

Kennedy is al­so an Am­plyx alum — she was Am­plyx’s CEO from 2016 un­til this April.

And with the fi­nanc­ing, NEA gen­er­al part­ner Ed Math­ers and Ar­ix man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Mark Chin join Sor­riso as the newest mem­bers on Sor­riso’s board of di­rec­tors.

“I am look­ing for­ward to work­ing with Mark and the Ar­ix team again as we ad­vance our pipeline of in­no­v­a­tive ther­a­pies through clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment,” Kennedy said in a pre­pared state­ment.

While European companies, including BioNTech, are focused on increasing vaccine access to African countries by setting up vaccine manufacturing facilities, the European Union is looking westward to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Speaking at a press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pédro Sanchez, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU is launching a new initiative for vaccines and medicines manufacturing in Latin America, to get drugs to Latin America and the Caribbean faster.

GSK, newly branded and soon-to-be demerged, shared interim results from its Phase II trial on its chronic hepatitis B treatment, one that it says has the “potential to lead to a functional cure.”

At a presentation at the EASL International Liver Congress, GSK shared that in around 450 patients who received its hep B drug bepirovirsen for 24 weeks, just under 30% had hepatitis B surface antigen and viral DNA levels that were too low to detect.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.