Engineer Weir has warned over staff cuts as it looks to save £75 million this year.

The group said it plans to slash costs by reducing its workforce further, as well as through less travel and discretionary spending, having already scrapped its 2019 final dividend and cut senior pay.

It has already axed more than 800 roles across its global operations in 2020 so far.

READ MORE: Housebuilder prepared for ‘most extreme’ year-long lockdown scenario 

The group said in a first-quarter update that its oil and gas division was just above break-even, but saw orders slump 34% as the oil sector has suffered badly from the coronavirus pandemic and impact on the economy.

Group-wide first-quarter orders dropped 13%, but Weir said it was expecting Covid-19 to have a bigger impact on the second quarter.

Santander UK has reported plunging first quarter profits after booking hefty charges as it braces for soaring loan losses from the coronavirus crisis.

The Spanish-owned group reported a 58% tumble in pre-tax profits to £114 million for the first three months of 2020 following a £122 million hit from Covid-19, which saw loan losses more than triple year-on-year to £165 million.

READ MORE: Scott Wright: Covid crisis will deny shareholders chance to put bosses on the spot

Its parent Banco Santander suffered an even greater blow, with first quarter profits crashing 82% to €331 million (£288 million) after putting by €1.6 billion (£1.4 billion) to cover bad debts caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The figures come as rival HSBC also revealed the impact of an expected surge in customer debt defaults, which nearly halved first quarter profits, alongside a warning that loan loss could rise to $11 billion (£8.9 billion) over the full year.

Santander UK cautioned that Bank of England action to slash rates to a new historic low of 0.1% to help tackle the coronavirus economic fall-out will further knock already under-pressure mortgage profit margins.

This will be slightly offset by falling rates on savings products over the second half.

The group said it was too early to guide on the full-year impact of coronavirus, but cautioned that a "more severe economic slowdown than forecast could also increase our credit impairment losses".

As with rivals such as HSBC and Virgin Money, Santander has also slowed its overhaul plans to focus on the Covid-19 response.

It said this would impact planned savings from the cost cutting.

Nathan Bostock, chief executive Officer, said: "Our first quarter results continued to be impacted by lower mortgage margins as well as the Covid-19 crisis.

"It is too early to reliably estimate the financial and business impacts this crisis will have on our 2020 results," he added.

Santander said it was helping 206,000 customers asking for mortgage payment holidays amid the crisis, equal to £32.4 billion of loans or 19% of its total mortgage portfolio.

It said it has also approved £186 million of emergency government-backed loans for businesses - around 5% of the total.

Scientists hope to begin clinical tests of a new anti-viral drug which has had positive results in laboratory tests against Covid-19.

Pneumagen, a University of St Andrews spin-out company, carried out three separate in-vitro studies into preventing coronavirus infections, including Sars-CoV-2 infection, the cause of Covid-19, using Neumifil and multivalent Carbohydrate Binding Modules (mCBMs) generated using its GlycoTarge technology.

READ MORE: Interest in land with partly formed golf course near St Andrews

The successful studies involved both treating infection and blocking new infections.

Working closely with Public Health England's Porton facility and, separately, the University of Glasgow's MRC Centre for Virus Research, Pneumagen tested the activity of its mCBMs against coronaviruses using plaque reduction tests.

At both Porton and the University of Glasgow, the mCBMs were found to reduce the number of Sars-CoV-2 plaques in these tests when the mCBMs were used in both prevention and treatment of infection.

Pneumagen now wants to begin clinical testing for the prevention and treatment of Covid-19.

Chief executive Douglas Thomson said: "Today's positive results from in-vitro studies of our mCBMs against coronaviruses show that glycan binding has the potential to prevent and treat infection.

"This further supports the value of our universal therapeutic modality to block access to lung cells of Sars-CoV-2, as well as other viruses, that cause respiratory tract infections, providing the potential for a pan-viral respiratory product.

"Our goal is now to rapidly begin clinical testing for the prevention and treatment of Covid-19."