Chris Doherty, managing director of the UK's Alderley Park, tells Scrip that the departure of the drug giant from its global R&D headquarters has acted as a catalyst to create a vibrant biotech cluster that is attractive to local, national and international companies.

Full results from asthma patients included in the Salford Lung Study provide powerful support for the use of “real world” effectiveness studies as a more relevant form of evidence to inform prescribing choices and improve patient outcomes, particularly in what turned out to be a general population of asthmatics that were still suffering symptoms under usual care.

The firms' messenger RNA alliance inked back on 2013 is still very much ongoing but AstraZeneca decided to sell its considerable stake in the high-profile biotech to help finance its own pipeline.