Can a small biotech successfully tackle an Everest climb like Alzheimer’s? Athira has $85M and some influential backers ready to give it a shot

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

Which brings me to Athira, a little, Seattle-based biotech that caught my attention with a heads-up that they’re announcing an $85 million round today to fund their Phase II/III quest for Alzheimer’s. Athira’s team has been on a long, 9-year journey to get here, and they are acutely aware of the burned-out wreckage and disaster headlines covering the route that they have been cruising.