AstraZeneca Unveils See-Through Lab Design In Cambridge
British drugmaker AstraZeneca pulled the covers off its plans for a see-through laboratory building in its new £330m global headquarters located in Cambridge. The company said it hopes the facility’s layout will encourage more interaction, collaboration, and ultimately innovation within its corridors.
The innovative building was inspired by a traditional Cambridge college. It will accommodate a grassy quadrangle in its center and will open its ground floor level to the public. Mene Pangalos, EVP of Innovative Medicines & Early Development at AstraZeneca, told Telegraph UK that science and collaboration is the core of the facility’s design. “Many old R&D sites are big campuses where it takes a long time to get from one place to another. This is almost triangular so you can circumnavigate it in under five minutes. The ease of interaction between people is quite different.”
For the first time, the company will merge its MedImmune unit with its old school drug development business in the same building. MedImmune is responsible for developing ‘large molecule’ therapies using antibodies and is located at a separate facility in Cambridge. AstraZeneca also hopes to rub shoulders with several of its new neighbors in the Cambridge Biomedical Campus as well as scientists from the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK.
In addition to its design geared for innovation, the facility will also boost its eco-creds with an eco-friendly energy management system, ‘green’ roofs, and a connection to the largest ground source heat pump in the EU. AZ revealed that plans for the innovative facility formed part of the company’s arsenal against Pfizer’s £70 billion takeover offer earlier this year.
“We are very excited to be able to reveal the plans for our new site in Cambridge today. Our aim is to create an open, welcoming and vibrant centre that will inspire our teams and partners to push the boundaries of scientific innovation,” Mr. Pangalos said.
This is not the first attempt by AstraZeneca to foster an atmosphere of “open innovation” within the industry. In 2011, the company announced that it would be opening up 22 of its clinical and preclinical compounds to external academic investigators in the UK. This move was made in order to enable researchers to thoroughly test drug candidates to find potential answers for patients suffering from unmet medical needs, both within and outside of AstraZeneca’s focus.
The company said it expects to move its headquarters to the facility following its completion by the end of 2016.