MedImmune opens UK facility

Some much-needed good news for the UK: MedImmune has opened a new biologics R&D facility in Cambridge that it says will boost the number of candidate drugs that it can develop each year.

MedImmune, which AstraZeneca acquired for $15.6 billion, was merged with Cambridge Antibody Technology last year to become AZ's biologics unit. The new facility is part of the company's strategy to aggressively boost its biologic offerings and deliver an average of one new biologic product per year from 2013.

"Today, MedImmune has one of the largest and most diverse biologics product pipelines in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. We want to maximise our potential to develop new and better medicines, so adequate space and resource for R&D is a real priority for us," said Jane Osbourn, vice president of research, Cambridge.

- here's MedImmune's release
- see this article for more