AstraZeneca (AZN.L) has suffered a dramatic stock market collapse, shedding more than £20 billion in value after a major clinical trial setback.
The FTSE 100 pharmaceutical giant’s shares plunged by as much as 11% on Thursday morning following disappointing results from a trial for its Wainua drug.
Wainua, which is being jointly developed with US firm Ionis, failed to meet its primary goal of reducing deaths related to heart disease when added to standard patient care.
The drug is a gene silencer that suppresses the production of abnormal proteins in the liver, which can affect tissues elsewhere in the body.
The trial was designed to examine treatment approaches for transthyretin-mediated amyloid cardiomyopathy, a progressive condition affecting an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people worldwide.
Sharon Barr, AstraZeneca’s executive vice president of biopharmaceuticals research and development, acknowledged the outcome while highlighting broader scientific value from the data gathered.
Barr said the trial was “designed to examine the role of Wainua, a gene silencer treatment, on top of today’s standard of care in reducing recurring cardiovascular events and mortality.”
She added: “Although the trial did not meet its primary objective, we believe the results support greater scientific understanding of treatment approaches for the hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide suffering from this progressive and often fatal condition.”
The disappointing result dragged AstraZeneca’s stock to the bottom of the FTSE 100 Index, pulling the wider index into negative territory during morning trading.
Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG, warned the failure carried significant commercial consequences for the Anglo-Swedish firm’s longer-term ambitions.
Beauchamp said: “Heart disease is big business for pharmaceuticals, and today’s news is a major blow for AstraZeneca.”
He added: “Given the expected revenue benefits from this drug will not materialise for the foreseeable future, AstraZeneca’s ambitious targets for 2030 now look under serious threat.”
The scale of the potential revenue loss is considerable, with analysts pointing to forecasts that had placed enormous commercial expectations on Wainua performing well in this indication.
Neil Wilson, Saxo UK investor strategist, said: “This is undeniably a very big setback for AstraZeneca, which was counting on something like six billion US dollars in peak annual sales from the drug, called Wainua.”
Wilson noted that the trial failure was not the company’s only recent difficulty, adding: “Astra has many more irons in the fire but this is a disappointment and comes after US regulators delayed approval for a cancer drug.”
The results mark a rare stumble for AstraZeneca, which has generally maintained a strong pipeline of clinical successes over recent years and built investor confidence through consistent drug approvals.