Monday 21 February 2022 6:57 pm

Synairgen shares collapse 94 per cent as results disappoint

City businesses are increasingly offering private healthcare insurance as an employee benefit when trying to recruit new staff, recruiters and insurers told Morning Wire — A rising demand for private healthcare insurance has helped boost profits at Britain’s big insurers.

Biotech firm Synairgen saw shares collapse by 94 per cent today after its asthma drug proved a poor treatment for Covid-19 in trials.

The study of 623 hospital patients showed that those who received Synairgen’s asthma drug recovered no quicker than those who were given a placebo. Company shares yesterday touched lows of 10p down 94 per cent from the previous close price of 171p. Founded by three professor’s at the University of Southampton in 2003, the company’s share price rocketed by 3,000 per cent when its asthma drug SNG001 was first tapped as a defence against Covid-19 in 2020.

Richard Marsden, the chief executive of Synairgen, said that the company was “disappointed by the overall outcome,” and suggested that improvements to standard patient care may have undermined the potential of the drug to show a clinical benefit to patients.

“Despite this we have observed an encouraging trend in prevention of progression to severe disease and death, which we strongly believe merits further investigation in a platform trial. We are now analysing the full dataset to better understand all the findings,” Marsden continued.

Numerous biotech firms have been struggling as the Covid-19 pandemic peters out prompting investors to abandon the sector. While Biotech groups have raised a record $32.7bn in initial public offerings over the past two years, according to data from Refinitiv, some 83 per cent of recently listed US biotech and pharma stocks have slipped below their IPO value.

Shares closed at 35p, down by 80 per cent across the day.