AstraZeneca plc is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical multinational pharmaceutical company with its headquarters at Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge in England. The company was founded in the year 1999 and incorporated in 1992. At a time when leading pharmaceutical companies were forming mergers with their major competitors for unrestricted growth, AstraZeneca was formed as the result of a remarkable merger between two major pharmaceutical companies, Astra AB and Zeneca Group plc. While the former was a Swedish company which was established by a group of medical professionals in the year 1913, the latter was a British company established in the year 1993 following the demerger of Imperial Chemical Industries. Zeneca mainly operated in the segment of oncology. Astra began with penicillin and anesthetics and went on to add gastro-esophageal and cardiovascular treatments to its list of products. The rise in the cost of development of new medicines pressurized the company to enter into partnership with global pharmaceutical companies. The two companies joined hands to form AstraZeneca in the year 1999. It was decided that the headquarters of the company would be in London, United Kingdom. A new site called Fairfax-plus was selected for the company’s base in US. During the outbreak of the pandemic, the company became the talk of the town and developed its own vaccine called the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine for the deadly and contagious virus. The company’s anti-lung cancer drug called Iressa received approval and was made public in Japan in the year 2002.

The company specializes in the therapy areas of cardiovascular disorders, anti-infective, renal diseases, metabolic diseases, oncology, neuroscience, inflammation and respiratory disorders.

AstraZeneca has its manufacturing facilities at North Ryde, Sydney in Australia and also at Sodertalje in Sweden. The company set up a facility at Leiden in Netherlands for the development of its COVID-19 vaccine. The company has four research and development units at Cambridge in the UK, at Gaithersburg in the US, at Gothenburg in Sweden and at Boston in Massachusetts. With the acquisition of Alexion, the company has now added another center to its list. It is located at New Haven, Connecticut in the US. The international presence of the company is in countries like the UK, USA, and Sweden.

Some of the top products of the company include FORXIGA, BRILINTA, XIGDUO, CRESTOR, SELOKEN, BETALOC, LYNPARZA, IMDUR, KOMBIGLYZE, TAGRISSO, ZOLADEX, ONGLYZA, SYMBICORT, ARIMIDEX, QTERN, FASLODEX, IMFINZI, IRESSA, VANCOCIN-CP, NOLVADEX, CASODEX, OLWAYS-AM, DIPRIVAN, BYETTA, MIT'S LINCTUS-DX, OLWAYS, VALFECT, MIT'S CODEINE COMP, OLWAYS-H, NITRACT and VIGOCIL.