According to reports, the biotechnology company Abpro has rescheduled its $96 million IPO, delaying a capital infusion it hoped would support the first clinical trials of its lead product candidates over the next year. The Woburn, Massachusetts-based biotech, were trying to acquire a couple of immuno-oncology and ophthalmology agents still in discovery and preclinical phases, when they were filing to provide 4 million shares between $14 and $16 under the Nasdaq symbol ABP.  Abpro is planning to begin phase 1 testing in the first half of 2019, starting with studies of ABP-100 in the breast, gastric and endometrial cancer, and ABP-201 in vascular eye diseases including wet age-related macular degeneration.

Abpro’s announced that it had not yet filed investigational new drug applications for FDA permission to start clinical trials, instead offering results from mouse models. The company reports the two products as next-generation, dual-targeting antibodies: ABP-100, licensed from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, secure both HER2 on cancer cells and CD3 on T cells to launch an antitumor response. ABP-201, meanwhile, simultaneously targets VEGF and angiopoietin-2, two growth factors that play roles in the early and late stages of blood vessel formation.

 Abpro signed a $3.5 million an agreement with Chinese biotech Essex Bio to co-develop monoclonal antibodies in 2016. The Chinese biotech Essex is an expert in recombinant DNA technology. Essex will continue to have the commercial rights in China, while Abpro would hold them for the rest of the world. In 2017, Abpro partnered-up with AstraZeneca’s MedImmune to research Ang2-VEGF targeting antibodies, like ABP-201, under a new subordinate named AbMed. The companies planned to probe potential therapeutic areas.

In April 2018, two other biotechnology companies pulled the plug on their IPOs, including Alzheon’s $81 million filing and Mereo BioPharma’s $80 million plans, both on the side of phase 3 testing. Novartis subsidize Mereo as it planned to launch clinical studies of its brittle bone disease drug setrusumab. Meanwhile, Alzheon, wish to launch beta-amyloid blocker tramiprosate, acquired in 2013 from Bellus Health, formerly known as Neurochem.