A new £27 million Safety Assessment building at ASTRAZENECA’s Alderley Park site was officially opened in April. In October, the company opened an award-winning £34 million building to house support staff for its global pharmaceutical business. An investment of nearly £61 million was also announced in a new cancer research building which will house nearly 250 discovery scientists. New bulk drug manufacturing facilities worth a total of £90 million were opened at Astrazeneca’s Avlon Works near Bristol. A £16 million integrated facility for research and development was opened at Macclesfield for pharmaceutical and analytical R&D. New offices, under construction at a cost of £11 million, will house 220 staff at the company’s R&D Charnwood site at Loughborough.

Early in 2003, YAMANOUCHI relocated its European regional headquarters to Egham in Surrey.

NOVARTIS is making a capital investment in a refurbishment project of their headquarters in Frimley, enabling the Oncology, Ophthalmic and Transplantation business units to relocate.

ROCHE has just started work on a £70 million office building in Welwyn Garden City, to bring together up to 1,200 employees from the company’s global pharmaceutical development and local sales and marketing teams.

In 2003 AMERSHAM committed to a £24 million investment in environment protection technology at its site in Cardiff.

ELI LILLY announced a four- year, £220 million investment programme across its three UK sites. New capital projects include expansion of the facilities producing human growth hormone and capreomycin in Speke, upgrading and expanding production and laboratory facilities in Basingstoke and expanding laboratory facilities at the Research Centre in Surrey, where at least 120 additional scientists will be recruited.

CELLTECH is upgrading its sterile production facility at Ashton-under-Lyne in order to expand the range of contract manufacturing facilities, and has begun an expansion of its laboratories at Slough to accommodate the growth in its research pipeline.

More than £290 million is being spent by MERCK SHARP & DOHME to expand and improve the facilities at its UK sites. These include a new HQ building and development laboratories at Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, expansion of facilities at Terlings Park Research Centre in Essex, expansion at its bulk chemical manufacturing facility at Ponders End, London, and upgrading the company’s manufacturing facility at Cramlington, Northumberland.

SANOFI-SYNTHELABO continued its £35 million upgrade project at its Newcastle manufacturing centre. A new £2 million refurbished distribution centre near Sheffield was also opened in October.

BOEHRINGER INGELHEIM has now finished a major refurbishment and renovation programme at Bracknell, as well as a facility to handle all waste and recycling at the site, so that 90 per cent of waste is now recycled. Two projects to provide new Quality Assurance and Quality Control laboratories and office accommodation have been completed.

ABBOTT LABORATORIES announced a £39 million expansion of its biotechnology facility at Dartford, Kent, creating 125 new jobs and expanding the company’s workforce at the site by 40 per cent.

In October 2003, GLAXOSMITHKLINE opened a high-throughput chemistry (HTC) facility at its UK research centre in Harlow. Built and equipped at a cost of over £45 million, the new facility will house GSK’s chemistry capability. Continued investment was made at GSK’s manufacturing sites in the UK to improve efficiency of operations, with ten capital projects exceeding £5 million. These included installation of the latest generation of computerised manufacturing scheduling and planning at a number of sites.

GSK invested several billion pounds researching and developing new medicines. Around 40 per cent of the R&D budget was spent in the UK, with nearly half of GSK’s R&D workforce based here. The company continues to operate numerous research agreements with UK biotech and UK academic organisations. This amounts to more academic research in the UK than any other company, including 450 PhD studentships and more than 200 post-doctoral research collaborations.

ARDANA BIOSCIENCE raised £20 million to support the European launch of its first product, an androgen replacement therapy, and enable the company to accelerate earlier stage research and development projects and to prepare for five Phase 3 clinical trials in 2005.