With valuations heading higher, pharmaceutical companies are looking to make deals. “The M&A environment has kind of woken up a little bit,” Jay Stamatis, vice president and head of business development and acquisitions at Abbvie Inc., told the audience at Biocom California’s Global Life Science Partnering & Investor Conference.

GSK plc has exercised its option to a nonexclusive license to Elsie Biotechnologies Inc.’s discovery platform, following a successful research collaboration both companies entered into last year to explore platform capabilities.

Vect-Horus SAS has entered into a license agreement providing Ionis Pharmaceuticals Inc. with a worldwide, exclusive license for a specified number of targets using Vect-Horus’ platform technology Vectrans for systemic delivery of RNA-targeted therapeutics that can cross the blood-brain barrier and address targets in the central nervous system.