Madrid, Mar 24 (FN Bureau) The UK-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca will invest more than 800 million euros ($871 million) and create about 1,000 jobs for specialists of various profiles within five years in its new research and development center in Barcelona, Spanish media reported. Barcelona has recently become a strategic location for AstraZeneca, especially after the company opened a clinical trials hub there together with Alexion, a group company specializing precisely in rare diseases, in late 2022, having invested 32 million euros in it, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on Wednesday. AstraZeneca and Alexion are currently seeking to combine capabilities and create the hub to find new treatments in five areas: oncology; cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic diseases; respiratory diseases; vaccines and immunotherapies; and rare diseases, according to the report.
The new center will reportedly be located in offices that already house Alexion’s rare disease center, which currently employs about 90 people. AstraZeneca’s investment plan for the coming years aims to increase the resources allocated to Spain. In 2021, this multinational corporation, which launched one of the vaccines against COVID-19, invested over 93 million euros in innovative projects in the country, of which 48 million were allocated to research and development. In the last fiscal year, AstraZeneca increased its total investment in the country to about 400 million euros.