Acacia Pharma postpones London IPO due to market volatility

Acacia Pharma Group has shelved its £150m initial public offer on the London Stock Exchange due to "market uncertainty".

The Cambridge-based pharmaceutical group, which repurposes drugs to treat for post-operative and chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, was due to be the second largest flotation in London in 2015, with a main market listing planned for this month.

Acacia said its shareholders and management "elected to postpone the IPO based on the recent high levels of volatility and uncertainty in global equity markets and in the pharmaceuticals sector in particular".

Chief executive and founder Dr Julian Gilbert said: "It is disappointing that our intended IPO, which has received a good level of interest and positive reaction from investors both in the UK and internationally, so was disappointing it coincided with this current period of market uncertainty."

He stressed that the drug development programmes continued to progress well and management's ambition remained intact.

While there have been some successful listing in recent weeks, the first week of October saw Shield Therapeutics pull its flotation in London for similar reasons.

“The recent dramatic increase in volatility, which has led to significantly negative market conditions for the biotech and pharma sector, currently doesn’t allow us to launch our IPO,” said Carl Sterritt, chief executive of the pharmaceuticals group.

Further afield in the same sector a $34m Nasdaq listing for medical technology company Syncardia was abandoned in October, while Pan Pharmaceuticals withdrew its $100m IPO in September.

Outside the sector, the planned $1.7bn Wall Street IPO of telecoms group, Digicel, was also pulled earlier this month.