Expanding The Discovery Channel

Dec. 21, 2004

Additional R&D labs at AstraZeneca in Waltham, Mass., promise to aid in development of cancer and infectious disease drugs.

John McClenahen

Three thousand miles west of its corporate headquarters in London, England, pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca PLC is expanding its R&D presence in the New England city of Waltham, Mass., 11 miles west of Boston. The addition of 80,000 square feet of laboratory and office space brings the state-of-the-art Waltham research facility, opened in 2000, to 250,000 square feet. The physical expansion, which was inaugurated on Oct. 23, 2003, is expected to add more than 100 new science and research jobs to the local economy. AstraZeneca's presence in the Boston area dates back to the early 1990s when Astra, one of the $17.8 billion drugmaker's two legacy companies, sought a site outside its native Sweden to do research. "What drew us to the [Boston] area was not just the biotech cluster and the labor pool, but also the academic institutions, the fine hospitals and the overall technology base that is here as well," says John Hennessy, site manager of AstraZeneca R&D Boston, as the company's 64-acre campus is formally known. Today the site is one of nine R&D centers that the company -- probably best known to the public for the gastrointestinal medication Nexium -- has around the world. Of the approximate 400 people on the campus, about 300 are researchers. Much of the work being done at Waltham is the initial laboratory-based research (known within AstraZeneca as discovery-phase research) that precedes clinical trials on humans. "We have an infectious disease unit, and they're focusing on broad-spectrum anti-microbials, which would most typically be used in hospital-based settings," explains Hennessy. And "we have a cancer research group, and they are focusing on the major solid tumors -- breast, lung, prostate and colon," he adds. Significantly, the Waltham campus also includes one of AstraZeneca's three Enabling Science, Technology and Information centers. In simplest terms, it is a place where scientists work at computers, not at lab benches, to support not only the cancer and infectious disease researchers elsewhere at Waltham, but researchers at any of the other eight company research sites around the globe. The people who work in the center devise data mining tools and other computer applications that allow researchers to use and manage vast collections of information like the human genome map, says Hennessy. They may design a computer-based tools or buy software and integrate it into AstraZeneca's research sites. AstraZeneca has more than 11,000 R&D employees worldwide and invests more than $3.1 billion annually in the discovery and development of improved medicines.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.