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.

At the 2021 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, blood cancer researchers from around the world gathered virtually to discuss the progress that has been made in the field of hematology. Over the past decade, that progress has been tremendous. We’ve seen not only breakthrough approaches to care, but also significant improvement upon existing novel treatments and exploring combinations within those medicines.1 These advances have transformed expectations of what a blood cancer diagnosis now means for patients. While we’ve come a long way, I believe the most exciting scientific discovery is yet to come, and that future advances will truly transform patient care.

The FDA on Thursday authorized another new pill to treat the Omicron variant, this time from Merck.

While Pfizer’s antiviral may prove to be more effective, and Merck’s pill has left some scientists questioning the dangers behind its mechanism of action, molnupiravir will be another weapon in the armamentarium of Covid-19 treatments for the US in a time of need, as two mAb treatments from Regeneron and Eli Lilly are no longer effective against Omicron, and as supplies of a third mAb from Vir/GlaxoSmithKline are very limited.

It’s time for our holiday break here at Endpoints News, and like a lot of you, we’ve been prepping for 2022.

Anyone who’s spent some time in industry can tell you the past decade has shoved the drug-hunting field into the forefront of the world’s view of things, garnering tens of billions in investment as new technologies look to change the landscape of R&D. And anyone who qualifies for first-in-class and best-in-class can clean up.

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Christmas is coming early for Gyroscope.

In its latest gene therapy gambit, Novartis is paying $800 million upfront to acquire the Syncona-backed biotech, with another $700 million reserved for milestones.

Novartis has been diving deep into retinal disorders, and Gyroscope’s lead candidate adds a potential one-time treatment for geographic atrophy — a leading cause of blindness — to the pipeline.

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Alzheimer’s disease researchers along with medical professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins issued a formal statement Monday asking the FDA to quickly pull Biogen’s Aduhelm from the market.

“An accelerated withdrawal would mitigate some of the harm of its unwarranted accelerated approval,” they wrote to FDA, explaining how Aduhelm “did not meet the FDA’s own criteria for accelerated approval based on surrogate markers because amyloid plaque does not correlate well with symptoms, severity of disease or progression.”

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On the heels of a big FDA approval last week for its keystone asthma drug, Amgen is adding on at its Irish manufacturing site.

Amgen’s site in Dún Laoghaire is about to get a $100 million upgrade to improve its formulation, aseptic drug product filling, lyophilisation and packaging operations as the company celebrates its 10th year in Ireland. The addition will add another 150 jobs for construction workers in the Dublin suburb. The project is set to be the company’s largest outside of North America.

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A low profile, Chinese biotech has been working on developing drugs for diabetes and metabolic disorders. Now, the company, known as Innogen Pharmaceutical Technology, has nabbed $120 million in venture capital.

Deal Street Asia reported on the financing this morning, listing the lead investors as Youshan Capital and China Growth Capital. Other investors include CICC Qide Fund, V Star Capital and China Everbright Limited.

The centerpiece of Novartis’s $9.7 billion buyout of the Medicines Company can finally go to market.

Branded Leqvio, the small interfering RNA therapy long known as inclisiran is the first and only FDA-approved treatment to reduce LDL-C, i.e. bad cholesterol, with just two maintenance doses a year after an initial dose and another one at three months.

Touting a “revolutionary approach,” Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan noted that the approval “creates new possibilities for how healthcare systems can impact cardiovascular disease, a defining public health challenge of our time.” The label covers both atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia.

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Sanofi is crashing the year-end M&A party with a deal of its own.

Immuno-oncology is the name of the game as it swallows Mountain View, CA-based Amunix for $1 billion upfront and up to $225 million in biobucks, tagging a suite of T cell engagers and cytokine therapies as well as a tech platform for making “conditionally activated biologics.”

“The Amunix technology platform utilizes a next generation smart biologics approach to precisely tailor-deliver medicines to become active only in tumor tissues while sparing normal tissues,” said Sanofi R&D chief John Reed, “thus bringing the promise of more effective and safer treatment options for cancer patients.”

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Bioscience & Technology Business Center The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas

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