AstraZeneca is one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, including world-class biologics and vaccines capabilities. We employ 76 000 employees in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia. We provide innovative, effective medicines designed to fight disease in important areas of medical need: cancer, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, infection, neuroscience and respiratory and inflammation. Recently AZ has started development of vaccines to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue in this important field. We invest over $5 billion in R&D each year with focus on small molecules, biologics, protein engineering, innovative delivery devices, new scientific modalities and new biology. More than 10 000 employees are active in R&D and in 2020 we had 171 projects in our development pipeline (Ph1-3 + Life-cycle management projects). We have nine R&D centres & offices including our main strategic R&D centres located in Cambridge, UK (HQ), Gaithersburg, MD, US and Gothenburg, Sweden.

We are active in over 100 countries with a strong and growing presence in emerging markets including China, Brazil, India and Russia. At AstraZeneca, innovation is about more than just research. We aim to stimulate continued creativity throughout our organisation by maintaining a culture in which our people feel valued, energised and rewarded for their ideas and contribution to our success - ideas which can make a difference in all aspects of our business. And we support and encourage our people in discovering their own potential, through excellent learning and development opportunities that are available to them throughout their careers.

Respiratory is one of AstraZeneca’s four therapy areas, and our medicines reached more than 18 million patients as maintenance therapy in 2018. AstraZeneca aim to transform asthma and COPD treatment with the bold ambition to eliminate preventable attacks and achieve durable remission or even cure for millions of people with respiratory diseases.