LONDON (Reuters) - Top AstraZeneca (L:AZN) shareholder Neil Woodford said a 16 percent fall in the company's share price on Thursday after the failure of a high-profile medical study was unwarranted and had not led him to change his view on the company.
The Mystic study results showed that a combination of two injectable immunotherapy drugs had failed to help patients as hoped.
Woodford, however, said the scale of the share price fall was not evidence of the failure of the drug, the company's strategy or his fund's rationale for holding the stock.
Specifically, he said the market was failing to put sufficient value on the company's cancer drugs, including Tagrisso and Lynparza.
"The investment case for AstraZeneca is about so much more than this one trial. Across a broad spread of disease areas, the company is developing new ground-breaking therapies which have significant commercial potential," he wrote in a blog posted on the company's website late Thursday.