‘I speak as a healthcare CEO, but also as a nature lover and as a grandfather,” Pascal Soriot, chief executive of Britain’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, told King Charles III and a select audience during London Climate Week at an event in the gothic grandeur of Guildhall.
While the Covid-19 pandemic led to the loss of 7 million lives globally, Soriot says that the climate crisis and pollution “cost us 7 million to 9 million lives every year”.
“It’s affecting us all through respiratory diseases, cancers, health conditions, infectious diseases … This crisis is actually a health crisis.”
The 64-year-old Frenchman, who has made Australia his home, says the 2019 bushfires there showed him the devastating effects of global heating and spurred him into action: “Even though the bushfires were a fair distance from Sydney, the city was engulfed in smoke.”
He has brought together healthcare leaders and pharmaceutical executives in a taskforce for the Sustainable Markets Initiative, initially convened by the king, to speed up the private sector’s zero carbon efforts.
Soriot is better known for bringing the first not-for-profit Covid vaccine to the world in late 2020, after AstraZeneca – until then not a leading vaccine maker – teamed up with Oxford University to develop one of the first jabs against the virus.
“When [AstraZeneca’s R&D chief] Mene Pangalos and I said ‘Let’s do this vaccine at no profit,’ a lot of people in the company could have told me and Mene: ‘We don’t want to do it, it’s too risky, it’s complicated’,” Soriot says. “I didn’t get that comment a single time. It’s been a massive effort. A few people suffered personally from working hard … We’ve got a great culture, a great team. It’s probably what I’m most happy with.” He was knighted last year for his and the company’s work during the pandemic.
AstraZeneca suffered bad publicity about side-effects and production delays, and chose not to re-engineer its jab as a booster against new virus strains, unlike rivals. A study by health data firm Airfinity estimates vaccine saved 6.3 million lives, versus 5.9 million for the higher-priced Pfizer/BioNTech jab.
As the use of its Covid jab declines, there have been suggestions that AstraZeneca may sell its vaccines and immune therapies business. Soriot says this will depend on “whether the technologies [we] work on are successful or not”. Its Covid antibody treatment for people with weak immune systems, Evusheld, was a success initially but, like rival drugs, was found not to work against new virus variants in January. It has since been tweaked, and Soriot is confident that the new version works against all known variants of concern. It could be made available by the end of the year.
He reveals that the firm is also working on an antibody for microbial infections, at a time when superbugs – drug-resistant infections – are on the rise.
Born in the Paris suburbs – where he has said he got into street fights and learned about loyalty – Soriot trained and worked as a horse vet. “I love horses, always have since I was a child, and decided I would be a vet when I was five years old,” he says. “My mother tried to convince me to be a doctor.”
He later decided to combine his interests in biology and business, and began a career in the pharmaceutical industry in Australia in 1986, at the French firm Roussel Uclaf. He also worked in New Zealand, Japan, America and Switzerland, with senior roles at Aventis, Genentech and Roche.
AstraZeneca is reportedly drafting plans to spin off its sizeable China business and list it in Hong Kong or Shanghai to shield the company from worsening geopolitical tensions. Soriot refuses to comment on “rumours” but says: “Over the years we’ve always looked at all sorts of things … but 90%, 95% of what we study never happens.”
“I know our industry is not affected by these tensions today,” he adds. “And I don’t believe our industry would be directly affected unless the tensions become really, really very bad. But medicines are never under sanction.” He rejects the idea that a separately listed Chinese business would get new drugs approved more quickly.
When Soriot joined from Roche in 2012 and took over as chief executive from David Brennan – who was ousted over AstraZeneca’s thin pipeline of new medicines – the firm was the “sick man” of the industry. Little over a year later, its bigger US rival, Pfizer, ambushed the firm with a hostile takeover bid.
In the battle to keep AstraZeneca independent – which was waged in public – Soriot claimed that executing a merger with cost savings could delay life-saving cancer medicines and ultimately cost lives.
He had been through a major integration himself, as chief executive of Genentech, after the US biotech firm was bought by Swiss giant Roche for $46.8bn in 2009, bringing together “two companies [that] had very different cultures”.
Pfizer walked away from its £69bn takeover bid in May 2014, but Soriot then had to deliver on an ambitious revenue pledge.
It has been a decade of hard graft since – with Soriot earning nearly £120m in the process – and the company has doubled in size in the last five years.
AstraZeneca made a series of smart bets on cancer treatments and other medicines, including Lynparza. Work on the ovarian and prostate cancer drug, now a $2.6bn-a-year sales blockbuster, had been suspended amid doubts from the commercial team, but Soriot decided to “take a risk” and revive it after consulting leading oncologist, José Baselga, who would later join the firm.
Under Soriot, the firm ramped up research spending, to $9.8bn (£7.4bn) last year, and restructured R&D into smaller, more autonomous teams akin to healthcare startups. The firm aims to deliver at least 15 new medicines by 2030.
He took the decision to close the renowned research centre in Alderley Park in Cheshire, cut a tenth of the workforce and build a new £1bn HQ in Cambridge to bring all scientists under one roof, as part of Europe’s biggest life sciences cluster.
AstraZeneca is now the UK’s biggest listed company, with a market value of £163bn – which also puts it ahead of New York-listed Pfizer at $203.6bn (£155bn) – even after nearly £14bn was wiped off Astra’s value over concerns that a new lung cancer drug may not be as successful as hoped.
After almost jumping ship to Israel-based Teva in 2017, Soriot is often asked how long he will stay. “I can keep doing this job for many years,” he said last summer.
Today, he says: “The exciting aspect of our industry is that, not only do we help people by bringing them medicines that can either cure them or help them live with their disease, but the other exciting piece is that technology and science are evolving constantly. So there’s always something new happening, so you never get bored. I’m not bored.”
CV
Age 64
Family Married with two children and one grandson.
Education Studied veterinary medicine at École Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort in Paris; MBA at the HEC Paris business school.
Pay Total package, including long-term share bonuses, was £15.3m in 2022.
Last holiday Vietnam.
Best advice he’s been given “Pick a job not because you believe it will be better for your career but because you believe you will enjoy it. You will be more successful at something you enjoy, and you will have fun.”
Biggest career mistake “Out of loyalty, kept someone too long in a job that didn’t suit them. Trying to help one person too long cost many others a lot.”
Word he overuses “Someone else should answer that question.”
How he relaxes Cycling, skiing,
horse riding.
