AstraZeneca restarts paused £200m Cambridge project in £300m UK investment

The investment

AstraZeneca said on 29 April 2026 it would spend £300m ($408m) in the UK at two existing sites. The larger share, £200m ($272m), will complete an office building on its Cambridge campus, work the company paused in September 2025. The building is named after Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray crystallography work was vital to cracking the structure of DNA. The other £100m ($136m) will fund an expansion at Macclesfield, including a "lab of the future" that uses digital and data tools in drug development and upgrades to the existing complex, Soriot said.

Keir Starmer announced the investment at Prime Minister's Questions. He 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." The company said the plan would create scientific jobs at Macclesfield but could not say how many. In Cambridge, data analysis and molecular science staff will move into the new building from other offices on the campus.

Why the restart matters

The Cambridge work restarts a project that already existed; no new site is being built. AstraZeneca paused the £200m expansion in September 2025, having announced it in March 2024 with a promise of 1,000 jobs. That followed its January 2025 decision to scrap a £450m vaccine manufacturing expansion at Speke in Merseyside, which it blamed on "the timing and reduction of the final offer compared to the previous government's proposal." The Speke decision came two days after Rachel Reeves set out the government's growth plan.

The pause came as UK spending on medicines fell from 15% of the NHS budget to 9% over a decade, against 14% to 20% in the rest of the developed world, the BBC reported. Merck scrapped a £1bn UK expansion the same week as the Cambridge pause.

The investment follows the UK's December pricing deal with the United States. Under it, the NHS will pay 25% more for new medicines, Place North West reported, and UK drugmakers will be spared US trade tariffs, according to the Guardian.

Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca's chief executive, thanked the government for "their effort to improve access for patients, including four new [drug] approvals since the beginning of the year" and said he looked forward to "further enhancing the access and the reimbursement environment."

Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, called the Cambridge restart "highly symbolic" and said it showed the government working "behind the scenes" to attract big pharma.

Scale and next steps

AstraZeneca employs 10,000 people in Britain, including more than 4,000 in Cambridge and a similar number in Macclesfield, 2,000 across London and Luton, and 400 at Speke. Macclesfield is its second largest manufacturing site. The £300m is dwarfed by the $50bn the company is investing in US research and manufacturing and its $15bn drive in China.

Designs have not been drawn up for the Macclesfield expansion, which Place North West understands would support the company's oncology research. No completion date has been published for either site.