AZN's Enhertu receives EU approval, Biffa wins Deposit Return Scheme contract

London pre-open

The FTSE 100 was being called to open 28.1 points lower ahead of the bell on Tuesday after closing out the previous session 0.90% higher at 7,223.24.

Stocks to watch

Drugmaker AstraZeneca's Enhertu has received European Union approval to be used as a monotherapy for the treatment of adult patients with unresectable or metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer.

AstraZeneca said on Tuesday that approval by the European Commission followed "ground-breaking" results from the DESTINY-Breast03 trial, in which Enhertu demonstrated a 72% reduction in the risk of disease progression or death versus trastuzumab emtansine.

Sustainable waste management company Biffa said on Tuesday that it had won a 10-year contract to provide logistics, sorting and counting services for the UK's first Deposit Return Scheme for drinks containers in Scotland.

Biffa will be the logistics partner for the scheme, with responsibilities including the collection of bottles and cans from around 30,000 locations. It will also build and operate three counting centres. No financial details were disclosed.

Newspaper round-up

Motorists can expect reductions of about £1.50 a tank after fuel prices dropped from record highs seen in recent months. According to the AA motoring group, average pump prices for petrol have fallen since the start of the month, when prices were 191.53p a litre for petrol and 199.07p a litre for diesel. – Guardian

Plans to install millions of heat pumps to replace gas boilers are "insufficient" and risk missing the Government's net zero targets, National Grid has warned. The UK is currently installing just 60,000 pumps per year, 90% less than the Government's target of installing 600,000 heat pumps annually by 2028, National Grid's electricity system operator said. – Telegraph

The chairman of Heathrow has launched a searing attack on "slasher" airlines for failing to attract enough baggage handlers at the airport by paying higher wages. Lord Paul Deighton has leapt to the defence of under-fire Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye by laying the blame on airlines for the travel chaos witnessed at airports this year. – Telegraph

The Japanese owner of Arm, the British chip designer, has reportedly paused talks with the UK government about an initial public offering in London because of the UK's political upheaval. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has personally courted SoftBank and Masayoshi Son, its billionaire founder, in an attempt to get the Cambridge-based technology company partially listed in the capital. But the collapse of Johnson's government, along with the departure of key ministers involved in the talks, has prompted SoftBank to put the discussions on hold. – The Times

LV= is under pressure to disclose whether it will hand its outgoing boss a payoff after announcing that he will leave following the collapse of the plan last year to sell the mutual insurer to a private equity firm. Members of the customer-owned insurer have been calling for Mark Hartigan to step down ever since they rejected the takeover by Bain Capital in December. On Sunday it emerged that Hartigan would go and LV= confirmed yesterday that the search for a new chief executive was under way. – The Times

US close

Wall Street stocks reversed their fortunes to close weaker on Monday as a busy week of earnings kicked off with updates from some of the nation's biggest banks.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.69% at 31,072.61, while the S&P 500 lost 0.84% to 3,830.85 and the Nasdaq Composite shed 0.81% to sit at 11,360.05.

Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com