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.

Amgen will soon be the 10th biopharma company to pull back on offering drug discounts to contract pharmacies of safety-net hospitals under a federal program. Like its peers, Amgen argues that the growth of these contract pharmacies has ballooned in recent years and needs to be reigned in.

Beginning Jan. 3, 2022, Amgen’s policy will only allow 340B covered hospitals to designate a single pharmacy location, with the exception of federal grantees and contract pharmacies wholly owned by a 340B hospital, or that have common ownership with a health system.

The nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review on Wednesday released a new report highlighting the ways in which payers are generally ensuring fair access to prescription drugs, even when based on a set of criteria set by the nonprofit.

While noting the lack of transparency hindered the report’s results, ICER said that the “great majority” of payer policies in the formularies evaluated are structured in a way to support many key elements of how ICER defines “fair access.”