Finland pharmaceuticals company Faron (AIM: FARN) has crashed almost 90% of its shares,  as the company announced the Phase III INTEREST trial of traumakine failed to meet its efficacy endpoint.

The study was analyzing the treatment for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a grievous orphan disease with a high death rate, currently, there is no approved pharmacological treatment for the disease.  Experimenting with traumakine didn’t show any positive outcomes or reduced death rates when compared to placebos.

The mid-point number of ventilator-free days at Day 28, was 10 days in patients treated with traumakine, compared with 8.5 days. All-cause mortality after 28 days was 26.4% for the traumakine group, compared with 23% for the placebo group.

“We will further check the data in order to understand how the study diverges from our previous positive results with acute respiratory distress syndrome patients, both in terms of traumakine’s productiveness, and in the unexpected low death rate observed in the placebo arm. We also look forward to our plans to advance our next asset, Clevegen, which is a groundbreaking anti-Clever-1 antibody, into clinical development in solid cancers later this year,” says Faron pharma -Chief executive Markku Jalkanen.

The firm is waiting for an ongoing Japan-based study later this year and will check how to advance traumakine in clinical development.