How does AstraZeneca plan to address the rising global demand for more personalized medicine and treatments in the coming years?
Every patient has individual treatment needs and a personalized approach is essential to improving treatment outcomes. At AstraZeneca, we call this precision medicine and it has been central to our discovery and development strategy for over 10 years and it will continue to underpin how we work in the years ahead.
Put simply, it’s about working with partners to target the right medicine to the right patient at the right time. This personalized approach is already being applied across 90% of our portfolio, where we use it not only to identify innovative drug targets and biomarkers, but also support the design of better clinical trials and ensure the patients we recruit to them reflect the diversity of the populations the medicines will be used in. Looking to the future, I believe next-generation treatments will include cell and gene therapies which use a patient’s own cells to reverse and potentially cure life-threatening diseases.
Just last month, we announced a $300 million investment in a state-of-the-art facility in Maryland that will be used for critical cancer trials and future treatments in the cell therapy space.
With the recent advancements in AI and machine learning, what role do you see these technologies playing in AstraZeneca's drug discovery and development processes?
Everywhere I go I see examples of the rapid advances in AI, machine learning, and digital technologies more broadly. These advances are accelerating innovative science and the delivery of life-changing medicines for some of the most serious and complex diseases today. Talking to the medicine discovery and development teams, not only have we already enabled AI capabilities, but we are continuing to explore further opportunities as I feel we are really only at the beginning of understanding the potential.
One area where we are seeing AI make a significant impact is in our pipeline. Our AI-enabled platforms are using generative models to identify potential drug molecules twice as fast as traditional processes and help us prioritize those that will be most effective. We are also using generative AI and machine learning in antibody discovery, cutting the time to identify target antibody leads from three months to just three days. And, we are using advanced cloud data and AI tools to interpret genetic data faster with the aim of analyzing up to two million genomes by 2026 so we can enhance our understanding of disease biology, uncover new gene variants and potential drug targets for future medicines.
Overall, we are very optimistic about what AI and digital transformation can do but we must be vigilant and ensure that we harness these technologies ethically and responsibly.
Given the ongoing global health challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, how is AstraZeneca evolving its vaccine development strategy to tackle future pandemics more effectively?
For me, the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light many challenges in the healthcare landscape globally while also showing what could be achieved when there was true collaboration between the public and private sectors. During the pandemic we demonstrated that, collectively, we could move at unprecedented speed and scale and accomplish global rollouts of vaccines, reaching not only the developed world, but also lower and middle-income countries. Nonetheless, for us all the pandemic clearly set out the need to strengthen health system resilience and invest in preparedness.
Our vaccine strategy has, therefore, evolved to work with governments around the world to ensure we are pandemic-ready with the right scientific expertise, vaccine development capability, and manufacturing capacity. For example, just recently in the UK, we announced plans in collaboration with the Government to invest more than $570 million in a new vaccine manufacturing facility near Liverpool which will enhance the country’s pandemic preparedness.
I also believe we need to achieve greater cooperation between key stakeholders to improve global health through policy change and this is why we have been working with governments, in particular, to establish a program we call the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience. To date, more than 30 countries around the world are applying this approach to positively transform health systems by partnering with stakeholders at the global, national, and regional levels.
Sustainability is becoming increasingly important in all sectors, including pharmaceuticals. What initiatives is AstraZeneca undertaking to ensure its operations are environmentally sustainable?
I think it is vital to recognize that the healthcare sector contributes around five percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The development, manufacture, and delivery of medicines is energy intensive and this is why we must deliver a more sustainable, low-carbon healthcare system.
At AstraZeneca we have science-based commitments and, as we just noted in our annual Sustainability Report, we reduced our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 67.6% in 2023 from a 2015 baseline. We have also made encouraging progress on water and waste reduction and transitioning our fleet to electric vehicles.
We are optimizing our energy efficiency and shifting to renewable energy sources. Last year, we announced new partnerships in the US, Sweden, and the UK to develop new sustainable sources of clean heat including renewable natural gas and wind energy. In 2023, 95% of all the electricity we used came from renewable sources, and we are aiming for 100% of our electricity consumption globally to come from renewables by 2025.
To address Scope 3 emissions, we are working closely with our suppliers to drive down emissions. We are asking our suppliers to also put science-based targets in place – a gold standard to rigorously measure decarbonization efforts. Over the last few months, we have more than doubled the number of suppliers with these in place.
Looking ahead, we remain steadfast in our commitment to reduce our emissions through our $1 billion Ambition Zero Carbon Strategy and the difference that our range of initiatives continue to make.
Collaboration between the public and private sectors has been crucial in advancing healthcare. Can you discuss any recent or upcoming partnerships that AstraZeneca is particularly excited about?
Partnerships are critical to advancing healthcare from scientific collaborations to policy exchanges and we seek to bring the best ideas together by working with a range of experts, institutions, peers, and governments.
I chair the Sustainable Markets Initiative Health Systems Task Force which was launched by His Majesty King Charles III when he was Prince of Wales. It brings together industry, the WHO, health sector organizations, and academia to help accelerate the transition to net zero health systems.
It’s a truly unprecedented collaboration and I am very grateful for what it has already achieved. Just at the beginning of this year, we announced the industry-first renewable energy agreements in China, which will result in annual emissions savings of approximately 120,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, comparable to taking 25,000 cars off the road. We’ve also put in place joint minimum emissions targets for suppliers, setting a new benchmark for the global supply chain.
To improve access to healthcare, one of our most successful interventions has been the Healthy Heart Africa program. Over the past nine years, this work expanded across nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa with the aim of identifying 10 million Africans with elevated blood pressure by 2025. To date, almost 50 million people across Sub-Saharan Africa have been screened for hypertension; over 10 million identified with elevated blood pressures; over 11,480 healthcare providers have been trained; and more than 1,500 facilities have been activated to provide hypertension services and access to high-quality, low-cost products. This could not have been achieved without our partners and the focus of the dedicated team.