AstraZeneca joined a Swedish doctors' firm with a British chemical spin-off
In May 2014 Pfizer offered 55 pounds a share for AstraZeneca, valuing it at 69.4 billion pounds, and was turned down. Had the deal gone through it would have been the largest foreign takeover of any British company. The target itself was a 1999 marriage of Swedish and British drugmakers.
The Swedish half, Astra, was founded in 1913 in Södertälje by about 400 doctors and apothecaries and grew into Sweden's largest drug company. The British half, Zeneca, appeared in 1993 when Imperial Chemical Industries split off its pharmaceutical and agrochemical arms. When the two merged in 1999, Zeneca's shareholders took 53.5 percent and Astra's 46.5 percent, and the combined group based itself in Britain. It has ranked among the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies ever since.
Buying biotech firms became a habit. It paid 702 million pounds for Cambridge Antibody Technology in 2006, and in 2007, amid worry about a looming patent cliff as major drugs lost protection, it spent about 15.2 billion dollars on MedImmune, gaining flu vaccines and folding all its biologics work into that unit. Later deals included Ardea Biosciences, ZS Pharma, and a 4 billion dollar majority stake in Acerta Pharma for its blood cancer candidate.
A 2013 overhaul closed research sites at Alderley Park, Loughborough and Lund, cut thousands of jobs and concentrated science in three hubs: Cambridge in England, Gothenburg in Sweden and Gaithersburg in Maryland. Headquarters moved from London to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, and research narrowed to respiratory and autoimmune disease, heart and metabolic illness, and cancer. In December 2014 American regulators gave accelerated approval to its drug olaparib for certain ovarian cancers linked to BRCA mutations.
The company ranked eighth among drugmakers by sales in 2015, and in December 2018 it bought nearly 8 percent of Moderna. Its shares are listed mainly in London, with secondary listings in Stockholm and New York.
Source: AstraZeneca
