Pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca has announced that it will move its Barcelona global hub to the Estel building on the centrally located Avinguda de Roma in early 2025. The news is a further boost for the centre, which opened in March 2023 with the aim of creating benchmark facilities for scientific innovation in Europe. The company now aspires to make it one of the largest centres of excellence and clinical innovation on the continent, and to use it to enhance Spain's role as a world leader in scientific research.

With this move, AstraZeneca is once again intensifying its commitment to Spain as a priority country within its global growth strategy. Currently, Spain is the leading European country in terms of the number of clinical trials conducted by the multinational, and the second in the world in cancer clinical trials, just behind China.

Generation of highly-skilled jobs
The move to the new building will be accompanied by the recruitment of a further 1,000 employees at the global hub, where more than 500 highly qualified professionals are already employed. The workforce is extremely diverse - 60% are women, and 33 different nationalities are represented. To achieve its new objectives, the British company has announced that the president of its Spanish subsidiary, Rick R. Suárez, will now also be president of the AstraZeneca Global Hub in Barcelona.

One of Suárez's tasks will be to accelerate the arrival of next-generation treatments in the company's five key therapeutic areas: oncology, cardiovascular, renal & metabolism, and respiratory & immunology, rare diseases, and vaccines and immunotherapy. 

High level of scientific talent
As Suárez explained, "Spain is a strategic country for research worldwide, and for AstraZeneca. The high level of scientific talent and infrastructure are crucial pillars in our mission to push the boundaries of science to transform people's lives and bring value to healthcare systems. Through the AstraZeneca Global Hub in Barcelona, we want to maximise our contribution to patients and to society, by driving innovation in areas where there are significant unmet needs, such as cancer and rare diseases.

The president of AstraZeneca Spain also said that "Spain and Barcelona have become key hubs in the field of innovation and life sciences. The biomedical ecosystem represents great opportunities for collaboration with both the public and private sectors, to scale our commitment to the development of disruptive strategies such as genomics and cell therapy, and to digital transformation and data science".

^{Photo: Estel Barcelona}