The boss of Britain’s biggest pharmaceutical company has said the government’s recent drug pricing deal is a “very positive step” but is unlikely to unfreeze a paused £200m investment in Cambridge.
AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, suggested that a UK-US deal on NHS pricing agreed in December would not be “sufficient” to restart the project to build a research site in the east of England, which was paused in September.
Soriot, who has rebuilt the company’s drugs pipeline since 2012 and turned it into the UK’s most valuable listed business, also described the US as “the most attractive market in the world”.
During Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing two weeks ago, AstraZeneca announced $15bn (£11bn) of investments in China, its second-biggest market, and is also pouring $50bn into US factories and labs by 2030.
The British drugmaker listed its shares in New York and they began trading on 2 February, but it kept its main stock listing in London.
While Soriot reiterated the company’s commitment to the UK, it has had a prickly relationship with the UK government of late, with a long-running row between industry and ministers over drug pricing and the availability of new medicines on the NHS.
The stalemate came closer to being resolved in December when the UK and US governments announced a deal over drug pricing, after pressure from Donald Trump for lower prices in the US, where they have traditionally been much higher than elsewhere.
AstraZeneca ditched a planned £450m expansion of its vaccine site in Speke, near Liverpool, a year ago, and later paused a £200m investment in its research hub in Cambridge, where it has its global headquarters.
Asked what it would take to unblock the frozen Cambridge investment, Soriot said the UK-US drug pricing announcement – which is estimated to cost the NHS £1bn over the first three years of the 10-year deal – was “a very positive step towards achieving rebalancing around the world, but also creating an attractive life sciences ecosystem in this country”.
He added that the company still needed to understand the practical implementation; as a “first step” the deal will improve access to a number of medicines for patients, but “it probably will not be sufficient for many of these truly innovative products”. He said only 40% of medicines that were sold in the US were available in Europe.
AstraZeneca’s breast cancer infusion Enhertu has not been recommended for use on the NHS in England and Wales by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the body that assesses new medicines for cost effectiveness.
Soriot noted that many drugs failed in development and said “that risk and that cost has to be recognised”.
His remarks came as AstraZeneca forecast steady sales and profit growth this year. Soriot hopes to reach a target of $80bn in annual sales by 2030.
The FTSE 100 company’s share price rose 2% in London on Tuesday.
It predicted that 2026 revenues will grow by a mid-to-high single-digit percentage at constant currency rates, with “some impact” from US price cuts, and core profit growth will be a low double-digit percentage.
Last year, sales rose 8% to $58.7bn while profits were up 11%. Sales in the fourth quarter rose 2% to a record $15.5bn, slightly better than analysts had expected.
Sales of cancer drugs rose 20% to $7bn in the quarter, but revenues from cardiovascular products fell 6% to $3.1bn, party due to generic competition.
Soriot said the drugmaker had 16 blockbuster medicines – products with annual sales of more than $1bn – and aimed to have 25 by 2030. It is now running more than 100 late-stage clinical trials, and expects to present results on more than 20 of them this year.
