A new treatment for heart disease could lift the fortunes of British Biotech, which has seen its workforce shrink from nearly 400 to 80 in three years.

The Cowley firm is to start trials on coronary patients of a drug-coated device designed to improve the results of surgery to reopen blocked arteries.

At the moment, a wire mesh 'stent' is used to keep the walls of a blocked artery apart. But in about 20 per cent of patients the artery becomes blocked again.

British Biotech has now collaborated with surgical device company Biocompatibles to develop a stent coated with the drug batimastat.

For the trials, British Biotech has recruited 150 volunteers in the UK, France, Belgium and Holland who are due to undergo angiography to widen their arteries.

Ethical approval for the trials has been obtained in France and the first patient was treated on December 24 at the Clinique Pasteur in Toulouse. The batimastat-loaded stent is being compared with a stent without the drug.

The two companies are asking US regulators for permission to start clinical trials in 50 centres in the USA and Canada, in the hope of securing US marketing authorisation.

Dr James P Zidar, of Duke University, North Carolina, who will run the US trials, said: "The investigator group is excited about this unique therapy."

British Biotech believes that batimastat will be only the third pharmaceutical compound to undergo clinical trials in the US in the field of stent drug delivery. No stent drug designed to prevent stenosis, or the narrowing of arteries, has yet received approval for sale, in a market estimated at $5 bn worldwide by 2005.

British Biotech's stock has plummeted since an all-time high of 301p in 1996 -- its highest point last year was 31p. It was the UK's rising biotech star until 1998, when its head of clinical research claimed that it was overstating the prospects for some of its drugs.