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.

Gilead recently decided to pull two indications for its cancer drug Zydelig — in relapsed follicular B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (FL) and relapsed small lymphocytic leukemia (SLL) — after failing to complete the confirmatory trials required as part of the accelerated approvals from 2014.

“As the treatment landscape for FL and SLL has evolved, enrollment into the confirmatory study has been an ongoing challenge,” Gilead said in a statement, noting it formally notified the FDA of its decision to voluntarily withdraw these indications.

While the US biosimilars industry has generally been a disappointment since its inception, with FDA approving 33 biosimilars since 2015, just a fraction of those have immediately followed their approvals with launches. And more than a handful of biosimilars for two of the biggest blockbusters of all time — AbbVie’s Humira and Amgen’s Enbrel — remain approved by FDA but still have not launched because of legal settlements.