Our Partnerships

We are committed to creating strong and long-term partnerships that help speed the delivery of innovative, life-changing medicines for the many people who need them. Founded on trust and transparency, we aim to establish mutually beneficial partnerships to better understand diseases, identify potential new treatments, and accelerate drug development.

BlueHealth Innovation Center

AstraZeneca is a structural partner of BlueHealth Innovation Center. BlueHealth Innovation Center is active as a non-profit association for 10 years in the support of start-up entrepreneurs in digital healthcare. The mission of BlueHealth Innovation Center is to support the digital transformation in healthcare through innovation and this specifically by fostering young entrepreneurship in HealthTech. The focus is mainly on guiding start-ups from the ideation up to the scaling phase. AstraZeneca brings with its expertise in oncology, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases knowledge, contacts and experience within the ecosystem. This new partnership will help start-ups move forward faster, and this will benefit patients to lead a better, more fulfilling and happier life.

Lung Ambition Alliance

We are proud to join the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer, Guardant Health, and the Global Lung Cancer Coalition in forming the Lung Ambition Alliance, a new partnership with one bold goal – to one day eliminate lung cancer as a cause of death. The first step toward achieving our goal will be to double five-year survival by 2025. To achieve this, we have embarked on a wide range of activities such as increasing lung cancer screenings and early diagnoses, delivering innovative medicine, and improving quality care.

Daiichi Sankyo

Our partnership with Daiichi Sankyo Company, Limited (Daiichi Sankyo) is enduring and aligns with our science-led strategy in oncology, which is based on four key scientific platforms: Immuno-Oncology, Antibody-Drug Conjugates, DNA Damage Response, and Tumor Drivers and Resistance. In March 2019, we entered into a global development and commercialisation agreement with Daiichi Sankyo for trastuzumab deruxtecan (ENHERTU), a proprietary antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) and targeted medicine for cancer treatment in HER2+ tumors. As of July 2020, the collaboration with Daiichi Sankyo has been extended to include a new global development and commercialisation agreement for DS-1062, Daiichi Sankyo’s proprietary TROP2 (trophoblast cell-surface antigen 2) directed ADC. DS-1062 is currently in development for the treatment of multiple tumors that commonly express the cell-surface glycoprotein TROP2, which is overexpressed in the majority of non-small cell lung cancers and breast cancers.

MSD

We established our strategic oncology collaboration with Merck & Co. Inc. (also known as MSD) in July 2017 to co-develop and co-commercialise Lynparza (our innovative, first-in-class oral PARP inhibitor that may exploit tumour DDR pathway deficiencies to preferentially kill cancer cells). We also committed to jointly develop and commercialize selumetinib (our oral, potent, selective inhibitor of MEK), part of the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway, currently being developed for multiple indications including thyroid cancer. This partnership maximises the potential of PARP and MEK inhibitors in combination with PD-L1/PD-1 medicines, based on growing scientific evidence that these combinations offer new potential for the treatment of a range of tumour types.

Biocartis

2018 marked the year we and, Belgium-based molecular diagnostics firm, Biocartis announced our collaboration to improve lung cancer EGFR mutation testing. The tissue-based Idylla™ EGFR Mutation Test (CE-IVD) study was initiated at more than a dozen sites in several European countries and had a focus on how the unique features of the Idylla™ platform could overcome the current complexity and long turnaround time of biomarker testing for lung cancer patients. The partnership was so successful that in January 2020, we not only agreed to extend the ongoing study to additional countries but also enter into a master collaboration agreement with Biocartis to initiate an EGFR Liquid Biopsy study. The master collaboration agreement enables the collaborative development and commercialisation of Idylla™ based molecular tests in support of our pharmaceutical products and marks a broadening of our existing partnership. The first project to be initiated under the new agreement is a study focused on evaluating if liquid biopsy testing using the Idylla™ ctEGFR Mutation Assay (RUO2) could provide further benefits to tissue-based EGFR molecular testing.