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| Pfizer CEO Ian Read |
Amid concerns that its planned buyout of AstraZeneca ($AZN) would deal a blow to U.K. R&D, Pfizer ($PFE) has teamed up with a host of British universities to collaborate on rare-disease drugs.
In a 5-year deal, Pfizer's researchers will work alongside scientists from Cambridge University, Imperial College London, King's College London, Queen Mary University London, University College London and Oxford University, hoping to spotlight new treatments for the world's roughly 6,000 recognized rare diseases, the company said.
The agreement "underlines the U.K.'s strengths in biomedical research," Oxford's Sir John Bell said in a statement, perhaps unintentionally echoing Pfizer's party line as it pushes a $106 billion takeover of British mainstay AstraZeneca.
Thanks to its long record of handing pink slips to white coats and slashing R&D costs, Pfizer's interest in AstraZeneca has set off alarms among U.K. leaders worried that a megamerger would spell major cuts in the country. Pfizer CEO Ian Read has reportedly pledged to keep 20% of the company's R&D personnel in the U.K. and not disrupt the construction of AstraZeneca's planned $500 million Cambridge research hub, but, to many, the company's résumé of postmerger closures speaks louder than any promise.
Since AstraZeneca rejected Pfizer's bid last week, Read has embarked on a sort of goodwill tour of the U.K., meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron and planning to appear before two parliamentary committees this month in an effort to placate politicians.
But word of Read's job-saving vows has reached his home country, and, as Bloomberg reports, stateside leaders would like some assurances of their own. The governors of Maryland and Delaware--homes to a combined 5,700 AstraZeneca employees--sent a letter to Pfizer wondering what a merger might mean for their states and received a polite reply but no guarantees, according to Bloomberg. Delaware is the site of AstraZeneca's U.S. headquarters, which is already slated for 650 job cuts, while the company's MedImmune business resides in Gaithersburg, MD.
Despite its political politesse, Pfizer can't well please everyone, and its designs on AstraZeneca, motivated in part by surefire tax savings, have galvanized elected officials at the federal level, too. Senate Democrats say they're working up legislation that would stop corporations from moving their legal addresses to the U.K. in search of tax relief, a process called inversion, but the effort is likely to run into partisan opposition.
- read the release
- here's Bloomberg's story