Fol­low­ing an $85 mil­lion Se­ries B round back in June, Athi­ra Phar­ma is set to be­come the third biotech in the last three days to go pub­lic Fri­day.

Athi­ra raised $204 mil­lion for its IPO af­ter pric­ing shares at $17 apiece, the high-point of its ex­pect­ed range. Ini­tial­ly peg­ging $100 mil­lion in fi­nanc­ing, Athi­ra said it of­fered 12 mil­lion to­tal shares and will trade un­der the tick­er $ATHA.

Now that Athi­ra plans to hit the Nas­daq, there have been more than 50 biotech IPOs this year, more than the to­tal from last year. Com­bined, the com­pa­nies have raised more than $11 bil­lion. Over half of those biotechs, in­clud­ing Athi­ra, raised at least $200 mil­lion each.

It’s al­so ap­proach­ing the 56 in­dus­try IPOs to oc­cur two years ago, per in­de­pen­dent an­a­lyst Brad Lon­car.

Athi­ra pro­vid­ed a de­tailed out­line with­in its S-1 of how it plans to use funds from the raise, il­lus­trat­ing that much of the mon­ey will be used to boost de­vel­op­ment for its lead ATH-1017 pro­gram, for­mer­ly dubbed NDX-1017. About $75 mil­lion will fund two tri­als in Alzheimer’s dis­ease, in­clud­ing a Phase II/III tri­al mea­sur­ing two dosage lev­els and a sep­a­rate Phase II tri­al, while an­oth­er $20 mil­lion will fund a Phase II study in Parkin­son’s de­men­tia.

An ad­di­tion­al $30 mil­lion is slat­ed to fund IND-en­abling stud­ies of two prod­ucts fur­ther down the pipeline — ATH-1019, for the treat­ment of neu­ropsy­chi­atric in­di­ca­tions, and ATH-1018, in neu­ropa­thy. It’s worth not­ing, how­ev­er, that these es­ti­mates were based on as­sump­tions of low­er IPO rais­es.

ATH-1017 fol­lows a fa­mil­iar strat­e­gy in Alzheimer’s re­search in tar­get­ing the dam­aged synap­tic net­work. But the com­pound fo­cus­es on a rel­a­tive­ly un­ex­plored path­way, the he­pa­to­cyte growth fac­tor (HGF), as well as its MET re­cep­tor. If suc­cess­ful, the pro­gram would re­gen­er­ate af­flict­ed tis­sue.

The com­pa­ny has got­ten this far thanks to a Per­cep­tive-led $85 mil­lion Se­ries B back in June, buoyed by da­ta in a Phase Ib that showed pa­tients tak­ing the ATH-1017 can­di­date were able to rec­og­nize a se­ries of re­peat­ed tones more quick­ly than the place­bo group. For those with de­men­tia, the nor­mal recog­ni­tion falls with­in a 400 to 450-mil­lisec­ond range, and the tri­al’s base­line was 390 mil­lisec­onds. The drug arm of the tri­al, which en­rolled just sev­en pa­tients, saw the av­er­age fall to 311 mil­lisec­onds, com­pared to no change in the four-pa­tient place­bo arm.

Joe Edel­man

Athi­ra will be go­ing up against some strong head­winds, as many Alzheimer’s pro­grams that have come be­fore have not proved promis­ing. Most promi­nent­ly, Bio­gen reg­is­tered fail­ures in sev­er­al high-pro­file stud­ies look­ing in­to the amy­loid be­ta the­o­ry. The com­pa­ny court­ed con­tro­ver­sy af­ter in­clud­ing APOe4 car­ri­ers, who are at a high­er risk of the dis­ease, in the low­er-dose arm of one of their tri­als with­out tak­ing them out of the place­bo group.

Per­cep­tive’s Joe Edel­man will own an 11.6% stake in the com­pa­ny, with CEO Leen Kawas get­ting 9.3% of shares.

Jazz CEO Bruce Cozadd didn’t beat around the bush.

In his first video meeting with GW Pharma chief Justin Gover last July 8, he offered to pay $172 a share to get the company, which had beaten the odds in getting its remarkable cannabinoid drug Epidiolex across the regulatory finish line for epilepsy. GW’s stock closed at $129 that day.

Cozadd had already done his homework on the financing to make sure he could swing it the way he wanted. He just needed to do some due diligence before making the non-binding bid firm.