Circassia slides after ditching allergy drugs

Shares in vaccines-maker Circassia were punctured yet again earlier after the firm, which was the UK’s largest biotech stock market listing in more than a decade, pushed its flagship anti-allergy treatments onto the scrapheap.

It’s only three years since Circassia’s boss Steve Harris promised “we only need to get one product approved in the US for all our shareholders to do very well”, when the Neil Woodford-backed pharma firm was spun out of Imperial Innovations.

But Circassia said it was cutting off new investment in its anti-allergy treatments after a string of failed drugs trials: the latest disappointment is a dust mite allergy treatment, which had the same effect as a placebo.

That was the same issue Circassia faced in trials of a new cat allergy treatment, which it had once hailed a huge innovation as 24 million are allergic to cats in the US.

That failure saw shares in the group sink by more than two thirds last year.

Circassia said it will focus instead on respiratory business, particularly a tie-up with AstraZeneca agreed last month.

The shares sank almost 8% at the opening of trading, before settling down 2%, or 1.9p, at 101.6p.