Caroline Austin
Vice President, Head of Transactions, Business Development at AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK
AstraZeneca’s purpose is to push the boundaries of science to deliver life-changing medicines and external collaborations are key to achieving this. I am proud to be part of the Business Development team, which works to create mutually beneficial partnerships and make a difference to patients.
In my current role, I lead a team of Business Development professionals specialising in the negotiation and execution of transactions across multiple disease areas. I also lead Business Development for Precision Medicine & Genomics. By partnering to develop diagnostics, we make it possible to match AstraZeneca’s targeted medicines with those patients who are most likely to benefit.
Some of the major projects I have worked on include:
• Collaboration with Merck on a PARP inhibitor in Oncology
• Collaboration with Almirall on respiratory products
• AstraZeneca’s acquisition of the respiratory portfolio from Takeda
• The acquisition of Pearl Therapeutics
• The buy-out of the Bristol-Myers’ Squibb’s interest in the Diabetes Alliance
• The divestment of various established AstraZeneca medicines.
In the Precision Medicine and Genomics area, I have led partnering activities with multiple diagnostic partners across molecular diagnostics, tissue diagnostics and next generation sequencing. I also represented AstraZeneca in negotiating the consortium for the whole genome sequencing of the UK Biobank participants.
I originally joined Astra as a bioscientist twenty four years ago, holding positions in the respiratory & inflammation area. Following the merger with Zeneca, I held various business development roles, from leading pre-clinical research collaborations through to late-stage development and commercialisation transactions.
I received my BSc and MSc from King’s College London, a PhD in Pharmacology at University College London, and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Clinical Immunology from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore USA. I am an Associate at the Cambridge Judge Business School.