February 16, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND -- To make transportation between its major facilities easier, pharmaceutical-giant AstraZeneca PLC will secure airline flights for its scientists and researchers four days a week between its new Cambridge headquarters and another major facility in Gothenburg, Sweden.
AstraZeneca partnered with Sun Air, a Scandinavian airline, to reserve 20 seats four days a week on a 32-seater commuter plane. The shuttle service is expected to considerably reduce the time it takes for AstraZeneca employees to travel between the two sites, as well as strengthen the bonds between the two research facilities and spark new innovations in research.
Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s chief executive, told The Telegraph, he hoped the shuttle service would cause the researchers based in both locations to “behave as if they were one giant research hub.”
In 2013 AstraZeneca announced plans to move its headquarters from London to Cambridge and expand research and development opportunities at the site. Currently the company has about 1,000 employees in Cambridge, but that number will expand to about 2,500 when the move is complete in 2016. The new site will become AstraZeneca‘s largest centre for cancer research and will also focus on cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, inflammation and autoimmune disease research.
Earlier this month AstraZeneca received final approval from the city of Cambridge to begin construction on the $500 million site, which came on the heels of an announced 3 percent revenue growth over 2014 that included six product approvals during the year and plans to purchase U.S. pharmaceutical company Actavis for $600 million.
The Gothenburg site employs about 2,400 people, with research focused on cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and respiratory and inflammation therapies. In 2014 AstraZeneca and the University of Gothenburg partnered to research respiratory illnesses, exploring the biological processes behind asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). As part of the personalized medicine movement, scientists at the university and AstraZeneca will explore how certain medications are better suited for different forms of the pulmonary problems. The goal is for researchers to identify certain biological, environmental and hereditary triggers and develop treatments that target the specific causes, rather than provide a “blanket” medication.
‘In the last five years, we have learned how to identify patients in different sub-groups of asthma and COPD... And the opportunity to cooperate with such a powerful company as AstraZeneca will most likely speed up the transfer of research results to clinical use, for example in the form of new medicines,” Jan Lötvall, chair of the Krefting Research Center at the university, said in a released statement.
COPD is currently the fourth most common cause of death in the world, and approximately 300 million people in the world suffer from asthma.
In addition to the facilities in England and Sweden, AstraZeneca also has a large research facility in Gaithersburg, Md.
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