AstraZeneca has dealt a new blow to the UK pharmaceutical industry by postponing plans to invest £200 million at a research campus in Cambridge. In March 2024, the former administration announced the project, which was expected to generate 1,000 jobs, along with another project in Liverpool that was put on hold in January.
President Donald Trump is pressuring pharmaceutical companies to increase their investments in the US, and Friday’s news follows the US pharmaceutical major Merck’s cancellation of a £1 billion UK expansion, which it attributed to a lack of government funding. We continuously reassess the finance needs of our company and may confirm our expansion in Cambridge is paused,” an AstraZeneca representative stated.
In the past ten years, the UK’s share of the NHS budget has decreased from 15% to 9%, whereas the rest of the industrialized world spends between 14% and 20% on medications. In the meantime, after Trump threatened to impose extremely high taxes on medicine imports, pharmaceutical corporations have been seeking to invest in the United States.
AstraZeneca announced in July that it would spend $50 billion (£36.9 billion) on “medicines manufacturing and R&D [research and development]” in the United States. Merck, which had already started building on a King’s Cross site in London that was expected to be finished by 2027, announced earlier this week that it no longer intended to occupy the space.
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