Blaming adverse market conditions, the San Diego biotech company Ambrx on Monday withdrew its planned initial public offering.
The developer of protein therapeutics had filed on May 2 to raise up to $86 million.
Ambrx specializes in antibody-drug conjugates, which use antibodies to selectively deliver medications to specified targets. These are typically chemotherapy agents. The antibody homes in on a surface protein found on cancer cells, and then the selective delivery reduces the damage to non-cancerous cells.
Ambrx has signed several partnerships with large pharmaceutical companies. This includes three deals with Bristol-Myers Squibb, one worth up to $300 million with Astellas Pharma and one potentially worth more than $300 million with Merck.
Biotech companies have enjoyed a remarkable run of initial and secondary stock offerings since late 2012. But recently, the biotech IPO market has been “sputtering,” according to industry watcher Fierce Biotech. That’s due to the high volume of offerings and “heightened skepticism” of their quality, it said.
Last year, 50 biotechs held IPOs and raised a collective $3.5 billion, the most since 2000, according to a recent industry report from Ernst & Young. That report, released last week during the BIO 2014 biotech convention in San Diego, also warned that investor eagerness would wane unless the industry as a whole became more productive.
