BY SHARON TODD, CEO
A quarter of a century ago AstraZeneca was formed by the merger of Astra and Zeneca. SCI’s CEO Sharon Todd talks to the company’s UK Chair Shaun Grady about future plans.
Pharmaceutical and life sciences giant AstraZeneca recently hit a huge growth target it set for itself a decade ago. Then the UK-headquartered company promptly set itself another big goal.
‘We said we would be a $45bn revenue company by 2023. In 2023, our revenues were $46bn. That target met, we have set a new target to be an $80bn revenue company by 2030 – and to introduce 20 new medicines in that time frame and to be carbon negative. So that’s our new North Star,’ says the company’s UK Chair Shaun Grady.
To go from the $26bn company it was in 2014, to the scale of AstraZeneca today, has been the result of the strategy led by CEO Pascal Soriot who joined the company in 2012 – at a time when the company was facing significant headwinds including a looming patent cliff for some of its biggest products.
Key among the changes made by Soriot was shifting the strategy to follow the science, putting the focus back firmly on working towards breakthrough innovation and cancelling the share buy-back programme that was happening at the time.
‘The key to all of this is, in many ways, Pascal – his leadership, his drive and energy,’ says Grady. ‘It really is all about the science. Follow the science is one of our values and that is what it is like in AstraZeneca every single day,’ he adds.
On his arrival, Soriot changed the senior team by elevating experienced AstraZeneca execs into leadership roles and he also put more focus and discipline into business development. ‘We did a number of deals pretty quickly to start to replenish the pipeline and the portfolio,’ says Grady, who points to the MedImmune acquisition prior to Soriot’s arrival as a particularly significant foray into biologics for the company, which had previously focused on small molecules and organic chemistry. Soriot also set the tone of what some AstraZeneca employees describe as casual intensity – the concept of being both relaxed in demeanour whilst also focused on the science.
The company took a look at its physical footprint, which led to another big decision made by Soriot and the new leadership team. ‘We decided we needed to be part of truly global life science ecosystems both for proximity for partnering, but also from a cultural, entrepreneurial perspective,’ Grady says.
This meant relocating discovery and some development activity from Cheshire to Cambridge and much the same in the US with a shift in focus in discovery and development from Wilmington, Delaware, to Gaithersburg, Maryland, and in Sweden, from Stockholm to Gothenburg. In each case the reason was to be part of an ecosystem with startups and world-leading universities. Significant activities still remain in the original sites.
The company now has five strategic R&D sites, including Boston and Shanghai.
‘The key is placing ourselves in true world-leading life science ecosystems, each location has different attributes and neighbours, who we work and surround ourselves with,’ he notes.
Looking to the future, AstraZeneca is investigating and investing in new modalities including cell and gene therapies, antibody drug conjugates, radioconjugation, T-Cell engagers and personalised medicine. ‘That’s the go forward, building on biologics and small molecules and developing to win in these areas in the near future.
‘We’ve had some good fortune along the way here and there, we’ve been reasonably successful, but we’re not by any means complacent. We almost feel we’ve just reached base camp and now the opportunity, and the potential, is enormous. So, we need to embrace AI, we need to embrace new modalities, but we need to do that within the culture, the leadership, the patient-centricity, and scientific endeavour that has got us to this point,’ Grady says.
Read the other pieces of the AstraZeneca In Focus special feature
How AstraZeneca is building an innovation pipeline
Visit Blog
