Circassia Pharmaceuticals lost nearly two-thirds of its value today as its experimental cat allergy treatment failed in a late-stage trial, dealing a major blow to the high-profile British biotech company.
Circassia listed on the London stock market in March 2014 in Britain's largest biotech flotation for decades and last year it expanded by buying two companies focused on asthma.
Its two biggest shareholders are Invesco and Neil Woodford, both longstanding backers of UK life science. They have increased their holdings in the last six months to 35.1 and 19.2 percent respectively, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Hopes for a cat allergy treatment have been central to Circassia's investment case, taking its valuation to $1 billion, but the company's immunotherapy failed to meet the main goal in a Phase III study because of a marked placebo effect among patients not on therapy.
As a result, all groups in the study showed improvement compared to the baseline and the results of the active treatment groups were not significantly better than those on placebo.
In fact, all the groups showed an improvement of close to 60 percent in rhinoconjunctivitis symptoms, such as itchy eyes,...
