Closing summary
European stock markets are a sea of red, amid rising tensions on the border between Ukraine and Russia. They started the day trading higher on hopes of a France-brokered summit between the Russian and US presidents, but a few hours later a spokesman for Vladimir Putin said there were no immediate plans for such a meeting.
The UK’s FTSE 100 index has slipped 0.3% to 7,490 while Germany’s Dax and France’s CAC have lost more than 2%.
UK and Dutch gas prices are rising again, reversing earlier declines, amid disruption from the storms (high winds have stoped liquefied natural gas cargoes from docking) and fears that Russian aggression in Ukraine will lead to further supply disruption. The British gas contract for immediate delivery gained nearly 4% to 180p per therm, while the Dutch contract for March increased by 3.5% to €74.70 per megawatt hour.
Oil prices have see-sawed. Brent crude is now up 1.25% at $94.71 a barrel while US light crude has gained 1% to $92 a barrel.
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Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Stay safe – JK
Updated
The British firm Synairgen has suffered a massive blow: its main product, an inhaled drug that was tested in hospitalised patients hospitalised with Covid-19, did not show any meaningful change compared to a placebo in late-stage trials. Shares in the company, a University of Southampton spinout, plummeted 84% to 26p today.
Intermediate trials had been promising and the chief executive, Richard Marsden, said:
While we are disappointed by the overall outcome, SNG001 has been administered to hospitalised patients on top of standard of care which changed substantially between our Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials. This improvement in patient care may have compromised the potential of SNG001 to show a clinical benefit in respect of the endpoints for this study, which were not met.
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.
The drug can be administered by patients themselves through a hand-held, battery-operated nebuliser.
