AstraZeneca's experimental breast cancer drug camizestrant has failed a late-stage clinical trial, though analysts at Citi say the setback does little to dent the company's prospects.
The bank kept its buy rating and £178 target price on the FTSE 100 pharmaceuticals group, arguing that investors had largely braced for a disappointment.
The SERENA-4 study tested camizestrant, an oral medicine known as a selective oestrogen receptor degrader, in patients with previously untreated advanced breast cancer.
AstraZeneca said on Friday that the trial had missed its main goal.
Citi described the outcome as unsurprising, pointing to a similar failure in a comparable study run by Swiss rival Roche.
The analysts said the shares had limited room to fall because the market had already turned cautious, leaving the stock valued at about 14 times forecast 2027 earnings.
They estimated the failure knocked only around 2.5% off their valuation of the drug, a hit largely offset by a brighter outlook for camizestrant in a separate, already approved use.
That approved use, backed by the SERENA-6 study, targets patients whose tumours carry a specific genetic change known as an ESR1 mutation.
Citi argued the failure clears the decks, removing an overhang ahead of what it sees as a richer run of trial results in late 2026 and 2027.
The analysts said the disappointment carried no read-across to CAMBRIA-1, a separate study of the same drug in early-stage breast cancer due to report in the second half of 2027.
They flagged a slightly higher risk, however, to part of the related CAMBRIA-2 trial.
Citi said AstraZeneca remained undervalued, forecasting annual earnings growth of about 15% between 2027 and 2030 and pointing to what it called the strongest drug pipeline in the sector.
