AstraZeneca has reversed its decision to freeze a £300m UK investment programme, unfreezing a £200m expansion at its Cambridge Biomedical Campus and committing a further £100m to its Macclesfield site — a move Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer described in the House of Commons as a "major vote of confidence" in the UK.
The Cambridge project centres on the completion of a six-storey office and conference facility on the biomedical campus, to be named the Rosalind Franklin building. The building, first announced in 2024, is expected to accommodate around 1000 employees, including data scientists and molecular researchers.
At Macclesfield, where AstraZeneca employs approximately 4000 people, the investment will fund what CEO Pascal Soriot described as "a lab of the future" using digital and data tools to advance drug development, with new scientific roles expected to follow.
The announcement marks a significant reversal. AstraZeneca had paused the Cambridge scheme in September 2025 amid industry-wide frustration about the outcome of NHS drug pricing negotiations and had previously scrapped a separate £450m investment in its Speke, Merseyside vaccine manufacturing facility in January of that year.
Two policy developments appear to have driven the change. The UK-US pharmaceutical arrangement, struck in December, exempts UK prescription drugs from US tariffs for three years in exchange for increased NHS spending on new medicines.
Separately, the UK government agreed a new rebate rate for new medicines of 14.5% of NHS sales in 2026, down from 22.9% in 2025 — a meaningful concession to an industry that had long argued the reimbursement environment was uncompetitive.
Soriot explicitly cited both developments on AstraZeneca's first-quarter earnings call: "We want to recognise the importance of the US-UK deal on pharmaceuticals and the leading role this plays in ensuring increased spending on new medicines and driving access to new therapies."
The investment lands against a broadly positive quarter for the company. AstraZeneca posted revenues of $15.3bn in the three months to March, an 8% year-on-year increase, with oncology growing 16% and rare disease treatments up 15%.
Cancer drugs now account for nearly half of total group sales.
Not all major pharma players have followed AstraZeneca's lead, however. Merck, which cancelled plans for a £1bn R&D centre in London last year, confirmed this week that its position remains unchanged.
Richard Torbett, Chief Executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, pointed to a broader shift in momentum, citing AstraZeneca's announcement alongside Boehringer Ingelheim's plans for an AI and machine learning centre at King's Cross as evidence of a "remarkable month for UK life sciences."