The pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has cancelled a £200 million expansion of its Cambridge site.

First announced in March 2024, the expansion project had been expected to create 1,000 jobs.

A spokesperson for AstraZeneca said on Friday (12/09): “We constantly reassess the investment needs of our company and can confirm our expansion in Cambridge is paused. We have no further comment to make.”

Cambridge is home to the multinational company's headquarters, located in the Discovery Centre at the centre of the Biomedical Campus, as well as being the largest life science cluster in Europe.

In July, the University of Cambridge publicly celebrated ten years of partnership with the firm.  Despite this, the company is looking to invest elsewhere.

That month, AstraZeneca pledged to invest £37 billion in multiple locations across the US by 2030. This came after President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs of up to 200% on pharmaceuticals manufactured outside of the US.

The £200 million Cambridge funding is not the only UK investment AstraZeneca has paused this year.

In January, the company cancelled a £450 million contract to expand an existing vaccine manufacturing facility in Speke, Merseyside. AstraZeneca blamed this decision on a loss of funding support from the government. 

At the time, former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt told the Financial Times that AztraZeneca's decision was a “massive own goal” by Reeves.

The cancellation came two days after Chancellor Rachel Reeves highlighted the importance of life sciences in a speech about her growth policies. The government has claimed life sciences are “one of the crown jewels of the UK economy”.

Immunologist and geneticist Sir John Bell, who worked on AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, has suggested that other large pharmaceutical firms will follow: “Ten years ago, we used to spend 15% of our healthcare spend on pharmaceuticals. Now it’s 9%. The rest of the world, the OECD, are sitting between 14% and 20% … if they can’t sell their products here, [these companies] will go and do their business somewhere else."

AstraZeneca will continue its normal operations in Cambridge, including at The Discovery Centre (DISC) at Cambridge Biomedical Campus – the UK’s largest research facility by number of scientists.

This comes amid wider turbulence for the UK pharmaceutical industry. On Wednesday (10/09), the US-based company Merch announced it was scrapping a lab it had planned to build, named the UK Discovery Centre. It also cut jobs for 125 scientists in London.