The drugmaker AstraZeneca has paused a planned £200m expansion of its Cambridge research site, completing a depressing week for the UK pharmaceutical industry.
The decision by the UK’s largest company means none of its much-trumpeted £650m investment package in the UK – which was originally announced in March 2024 – is proceeding.
The now stalled £200m Cambridge project had been expected to create 1,000 jobs. In January, AstraZeneca scrapped plans to invest £450m in its vaccine manufacturing facility in Speke, Merseyside, citing a cut in government support, after months of negotiations.
An AstraZeneca spokesperson said on Friday: “We constantly reassess the investment needs of our company and can confirm our expansion in Cambridge is paused. We have no further comment to make.”
The latest UK setback contrasts with the company’s moves in other jurisdictions. In July the company announced it would invest $50bn (£37bn) in the US by 2030, as part of a string of pledges by pharmaceutical companies as Donald Trump’s threats to impose sector-specific tariffs loom over the industry.
The British drugmaker, which is headquartered in Cambridge, said its US investment would fund a new drug manufacturing facility in Virginia, and expand its laboratories and cell therapy manufacturing in Maryland, Massachusetts, California, Indiana and Texas.
The news from AstraZeneca caps a week of negative announcements and warnings from a crucial UK industry.
Keir Starmer’s government has described life sciences as “one of the crown jewels of the UK economy”, while the previous Conservative government had vowed to turn the country into a “global science and technology superpower” by 2030.
Yet on Wednesday, the US drugmaker Merck, known as MSD in Europe, scrapped a £1bn London research centre as well as laying off 125 scientists in the capital this year.
Its planned new lab, called the UK Discovery Centre, opposite St Pancras and King’s Cross stations was already under construction and scheduled to open in two years’ time. It had been expected to employ about 800 people.
A day later, Sir John Bell, a prominent scientist and former regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, warned that other big pharmaceutical companies were going to stop investing in the UK.
He told BBC Radio 4 he had spoken to several chief executives of large pharmaceutical companies in the past six months “and they’re all in the same space, and that is, they’re not going to do any more investing in the UK”.
Then on Friday, Paul Naish, the UK head of market access for the French pharmaceuticals company Sanofi, told the Guardian Britain needed a “proper plan from the Treasury” for life sciences, arguing the country had become “not a good place” to develop or sell drugs.
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Sanofi said: “Any substantial inward investment into the UK is currently on pause until we see tangible progress towards making the life sciences environment internationally competitive.”
Also this week, Eli Lilly, a US drugmaker, said its planned London gateway lab, an incubator space for new drugs that brings together researchers, part of a £279m investment, was on hold.
The pharmaceutical industry has long argued that the UK needs to spend more on new medicines, bringing the NHS’s outlay on medications more in line with other countries.
A row between the sector and the health secretary, Wes Streeting, intensified after long-running NHS pricing negotiations broke down without an agreement in late August. Officials at the department of health, concerned after MSD’s move to pull out of research in the UK, reportedly want to reopen those talks.
The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry wants the clawback rate – at which drugmakers pay back a chunk of their UK revenues to the NHS – reduced from nearly 23% to single digits, similar to levels in other European countries.