One of the biggest projects that Pas­cal So­ri­ot ini­ti­at­ed, all the way back in 2013, af­ter he first took over as As­traZeneca’s CEO is fi­nal­ly com­plete.

Su­san Gal­braith

As­traZeneca is for­mal­ly un­veil­ing its $1.34 bil­lion (£1 bil­lion) R&D cam­pus in Cam­bridge, UK, a shiny new fa­cil­i­ty span­ning 19,000 square me­ters in the south­ern part of the city. On top of 2,200 re­search sci­en­tists, it will al­so host a suite of ro­bot­ics, high-through­put screen­ing and AI-dri­ven tech­nol­o­gy.

“I think it’s a very bold state­ment that we’ve got the new build­ing,” Su­san Gal­braith, EVP of on­col­o­gy R&D, said in a video, “be­cause it’s ba­si­cal­ly say­ing that R&D is the fu­ture of the com­pa­ny, and that we want to in­vest in hav­ing the best fa­cil­i­ties pos­si­ble for peo­ple to do in­no­v­a­tive sci­ence. So that it­self I think is a state­ment of in­tent for what we want the fu­ture of the com­pa­ny to be.”

From pre­ci­sion med­i­cines to next-gen treat­ments such as nu­cleotide-based, gene-edit­ing and cell ther­a­pies, the com­pa­ny has high hopes for the site, which it’s call­ing the Dis­cov­ery Cen­tre (DISC).

When As­traZeneca first an­nounced plans to build the new glob­al R&D hub and cor­po­rate head­quar­ters, the goal was to be ready for move-in by 2016 on a bud­get of $500 mil­lion. So­ri­ot’s vi­sion was for the team to be­come an in­te­gral part of the lo­cal ecosys­tem in Cam­bridge, “a world-renowned bio­science hotspot that ri­vals the likes of San Fran­cis­co and Boston.”

In the end, it was just like de­vel­op­ing a new drug. Fraught with high costs, dis­ap­point­ing set­backs and the source of bit­ter crit­i­cism.

Andy Williams

But the de­lays didn’t stop As­traZeneca from ink­ing over 200 col­lab­o­ra­tions in the re­gion, in­clud­ing 130-plus with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, on top of more than 2,000 around the world, ac­cord­ing to Andy Williams, VP of Cam­bridge pro­gram and strat­e­gy. And the open-floor de­sign of the new build­ing will hope­ful­ly deep­en these ties while fos­ter­ing more.

The grand open­ing on Tues­day fea­tures Prince Charles as the guest of hon­or.

Lo­cat­ed with­in the Cam­bridge Bio­med­ical Cam­pus, As­traZeneca is now neigh­bors with mul­ti­ple re­search hos­pi­tals as well as Ab­cam, the re­search tool provider.

Bristol Myers Squibb recently joined 11 of its peer pharma companies in limiting how many contract pharmacies can access certain drugs discounted by a federal program known as 340B.

Bristol Myers is just the latest in a series of high-profile pharma companies moving in their own direction as the Biden administration’s Health Resources and Services Administration struggles to rein in the drug discount program for the neediest Americans.

Amgen wanted to know how people with asthma really felt about daily life with the disease. So it bought a promoted tweet on Twitter noting the not-so-simple realities of life with asthma and ended the post with a #DearAsthma hashtag, a megaphone emoji and a re-tweet button.

That was just over one week ago and the responses haven’t stopped. More than 7,000 posts so far on Twitter replied to #DearAsthma to detail struggles of daily life, expressing humor, frustration and sometimes anger. More than a few f-bombs have been typed or gif-ed in reply to communicate just how much many people “hate” the disease.

The summer before Cellino CEO and co-founder Nabiha Saklayen started at Harvard, she lost her grandmother following complications to diabetes. Before then, she hadn’t taken a biology class since ninth or tenth grade — the mark of a classic physicist — but it was then she decided she wanted the rest to sit at the intersection of the two for the rest of her career

Combine that with being across the way from the University’s stem cell institute in Cambridge, and you get the birth of Cellino, an autonomous cell therapy manufacturing company that just announced the closing of its Series A.