Industry uses ESRF instrumentationI M P A C T O N I N D U S T R Y

A S T R A Z E N E C A

T H E K E Y R O L E O F T H E E S R F

F O R D R U G R E S E A R C H

T H E C O M P A N Y

AstraZeneca was founded in 1999 with the merger

of Astra AB in Sweden and Zeneca in the UK.

With an annual turnover in the region of $26bn,

it is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and

biotechnology companies. A site in Gothenburg,

Sweden, one of the company’s three strategic

centres, employs more than 2400 people from

50 countries.

T H E W O R K

Since the company was founded, AstraZeneca

Gothenburg has been using the ESRF’s world-leading

macromolecular crystallography (MX) beamlines

for research into respiratory, cardiovascular and

renal diseases. These beamlines resolve high-

resolution structures of potential drug candidates,

to show whether the candidates bind to the targets

of disease in an effective way. The beamlines

are accessible remotely, in some cases are fully

automated, and have recently begun to allow

scientists to simply mail in their samples and

download the data when they are ready.

Like many large pharmaceutical companies,

AstraZeneca Gothenburg used to have its own

X-ray crystallography facilities. In 2019, however,

the company decided to abandon these due to

the unrivalled quality of data available at the ESRF

and other synchrotrons and their increasingly easy

access It now uses the ESRF and other synchrotrons

for all its crystallographic drug research

T H E I M P A C T

“Without synchrotrons such as the ESRF, we would

not be able to perform structure-based drug design.

We are a big company with big expectations

– everything should work smoothly and excellently,

and at the ESRF it does The ESRF has always been at

the forefront of synchrotron technology and we like

that Its MASSIF1 beamline which we can use

completely unattended is very impressive we can

capture really good data from 100 samples

in a single shift Several drug candidates for

asthma and cardiovascular disease that we have

explored at the ESRF are currently in clinical trials

Linda Öster structural biologist AstraZeneca

Gothenburg

“Without synchrotrons

such as the ESRF, we would

not be able to perform

structure-based drug

design.”

Linda Öster, structural biologist,

AstraZeneca Gothenburg

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