Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has announced that it will invest £300 million in drug development in the UK, reversing its decision last year to scale back major projects amid tensions over drug pricing and the availability of new medicine on the NHS.

The funding will be split between two key sites. £200 million of the funding will revive the expansion of The Discovery Centre, AstraZeneca’s global headquarters at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, and £100 million will fund a new “lab of the future” in Macclesfield.

The unfrozen expansion means that construction on the Rosalind Franklin Building, an office building on the Biomedical Campus, can be finished. AstraZeneca will move people from several buildings into the new Rosalind Franklin building, including data scientists and molecular researchers whose work is primarily desk-based.

Currently, AstraZeneca directly employs over 4,000 people in Cambridge, around half of whom work at the Biomedical Campus headquarters.

In September 2025, the company froze its £200 million investment in Cambridge and scrapped plans to invest £450 million into expanding a vaccine manufacturing facility in Merseyside. It cited cuts in government support as the reason behind the decision.

News of AstraZeneca reversing this decision follows a deal over pricing struck between the USA and UK in December 2025. This deal will lead to lower prescription drug prices in the USA, and higher NHS spending on medicines. The UK in return will be spared trade tariffs.

AstraZeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, thanked the UK government “for their effort to improve access for patients, including four new [drug] approvals since the beginning of the year, and we look forward to further enhancing the access and the reimbursement environment and build a strong life sciences sector.”

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the investment was “made possible by the pharmaceutical arrangement we have struck with the United States to future-proof thousands of jobs in Macclesfield and in Cambridge. That is a major vote of confidence in the UK, and Labour’s plans to strengthen our economy.”

Chief investment strategist at investment platform the Wealth Club, Susannah Streeter commented that “the restart of the Cambridge expansion […] is highly symbolic. It demonstrates the government has been working hard behind the scenes to try and make the UK more attractive to big pharma.”

The scale of the unfrozen funding remains relatively limited in comparison to AstraZeneca’s plans to invest £37 billion in the US by 2030. As a company, it is currently valued at more than £210 billion.