Name: AstraZeneca's CFO on GLP-1 Drugs, AI, and More
Uploaded: 2026-08-06T17:40:00Z
Duration: 22 min 20 s
Description: Aradhana Sarin, chief financial officer of AstraZeneca, spoke to Barron's editor at large Andy Serwer.

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Aradhana Sarin, chief financial officer of AstraZeneca, spoke to Barron's editor at large Andy Serwer.

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AstraZeneca's CFO on GLP-1 Drugs, AI, and More

With all the action in pharma these days and GLP-1 drugs, it's sometimes difficult for the rest of the industry to garner attention. Recently, I sat down with AstraZeneca's CFO, Aradhana Sarin. One question I asked was how our companies addressing the red hot GLP-1 market, which at the moment is crowded with injectable drugs? All the action seems to be in GLP-1 drugs. So how do you keep up with the Jones' over there, those companies that feature those particular drugs?

Yeah, so we also have our own GLP-1 medicine development. The drugs in the market today are injectable, and we have what is an oral small molecule GLP-1. So not a peptide GLP-1, but a small molecule oral GLP-1. And we will be presenting soon the Phase 2 data from that and expect to move that into Phase 3. And again, for oral medicines, there's not a lot of companies that have oral medicines, really only one competitor ahead of us. The other thing where we think is really differentiated is, you know, GLPs have been used mostly for weight loss or diabetes management. But when you look at the patients that have metabolic disease, so, you know, as a bigger umbrella, many of them, or most of them actually have one to two comorbidities. So patients will have not only weight management issues, but either hypertension or dyslipidemia or other sort of comorbidities. And so what we're developing is combinations that allows us to treat the patient holistically with those comorbidities as well. So that's a very unique angle.

AstraZeneca's push into GLP-1s is key to its efforts to reach $80 billion of revenue by 2030. But when CEO Pascal Soriot first announced that target backed by plans for 20 new medicines, Wall Street was skeptical. You have this goal, your company does, of reaching $80 billion of revenue by 2030. 50% of that will come in the United States, I understand, or you hope to. How do you achieve that goal, Aradhana?

So when we set that goal back in May of 2024, it was sort of almost doubling our revenues from '24 through to 2030. And at that time, consensus estimates were at 67 billion for 2030, and we had set an $80 billion goal, right? So yes, it was very ambitious. But we also had so many things in our pipeline that we felt, you know, if we're able to have some of these positive readouts and, you know, get visibility on that drug pipeline, the 80 billion would be achievable. Earlier this year, that consensus estimate for 2030 has actually moved from 67 to end of last year was like 76, and now it's actually ahead of 80. It's almost 82. So the Street is already getting ahead a little bit, I think, of the estimate.

Is that realistic, the 82, do you think?

It's possible. It is possible. You know, there is luck involved in this business too, so fingers crossed for many of our upcoming readouts.

And is this growth organic or are you doing acquisitions?

No, all of this is organically driven. We do do licensing deals in the early phases, so preclinical, some Phase 1. But again, the lifetime of developing those still takes another six to seven years. So the growth we have till 2030 is really organically driven.

Let's talk about the company a little bit itself. Obviously, oncology, cancer drugs, cancer therapies have been a real strength of AstraZeneca. Is that still the primary growth area or what non-cancer areas are investors missing?

So I would say for the last five years, definitely oncology has been the key driver of growth, but also the biopharma business. So biopharma is sort of a bigger unit, which includes cardiovascular-renal medicines, as well as respiratory and immunology medicines. So while oncology is still very important, we think the next phase of growth that we'll see is actually gonna come from biopharma. And there's some really exciting medicines in the cardiovascular-renal portfolio. One we just launched not even, you know, a month back. It's a novel drug for hypertension. So several million people live in the country who have what is called resistant hypertension. So you may be on two to three hypertensive drugs already, but still your blood pressure is not controlled. And this was a brand new mechanism. So new innovation in hypertension that never happened in 30 years. And we just launched that drug. And there are many other drugs similar to that that are novel drugs in the cardiovascular portfolio. So we've seen that and respiratory as well, that will be the next growth driver.

To support its goals for growth, the company recently shifted its US listing from the NASDAQ to the New York Stock Exchange. This move sets up AstraZeneca to appeal to a broader range of investors, especially in the US market. So you recently changed the listing of AstraZeneca, which of course is one of the world's largest pharma and biotech companies based in the UK, but it's a global company, of course. But you recently changed your US listing. Why?

So what we had in the US earlier were ADRs, which is what most foreign issuers have. And what we did is actually change that to regular shares, so ordinary shares. And the shares that we now have listed on the New York Stock Exchange are the same exact shares that are traded on the LSE and traded in Stockholm. So, you know, doing that and all the backend of actually enabling all that trading was actually quite complicated. But that is what we did, which was harmonized the listings across the three exchanges. And the reason for doing that was, you know, our shareholder base has changed over the last five years. So five years back, we were probably closer to 36-37% US shareholders. Today, we're closer to 45. And a lot of that has been driven, yes, by the growth of the company, but also we are a growth company, you know, in terms of innovation and R&D. And we think, you know, in the US, growth is very much rewarded and supported. So we wanted to enable less friction in that whole trading and process. So that was really the reason for doing that.

Even with a multi-billion dollar R&D budget, AstraZeneca can't fund every promising drug program. Choosing which drugs to bet on and which to cut is the job of executive leadership. Talk to me about part of your job working with your chief executive, I'm sure, about deploying capital. And you have all these mouths to feed in terms of scientists who want you to fund their drug experiments, right? How do you go about doing that?

It's a very difficult, it's a very difficult balance to strike. I can tell you that most people in R&D probably hate me because, you know, my job is to make sure we're making the best investments. And in a way, it's a high class problem because, you know, there are companies who don't have the pipeline that we have, right? So we actually have many drugs and we have great, great people who are really experts in this field, in their own field, whether it's in oncology or cardiovascular. So we have great people, we have great actual assets to put behind. And then we just need to do, you know, studies, but those studies take a lot of capital. And so our job is to prioritize what we will invest behind. And the prioritization happens on a bunch of metrics. So it's not just financial metrics. It's, you know, where's the most unmet medical need? You know, how much is the product de-risked? You know, what do we know about the science that gives us comfort that taking this bet will pay off? And of course, the financial and pricing and how the landscape may evolve in five years from now when you actually end up launching the product. So all of that is taken into account to prioritize. But, you know, that's something that I feel is probably our greatest responsibility as an executive team is to make those choices.

Are you using AI in that process? I mean, you have so many different inputs with so many different variables, right?

Not quite yet in that decision-making process, because like you said, there are a lot of variables and not all those variables are necessarily sort of distilled down to, you know, a particular input. And also there's a lot of judgment involved from people who are, again, experts in regulatory or statistics, et cetera. So we're working towards including more and more AI in our clinical trials. So places where we are using AI is, for example, what's the right medicine for a particular patient, right? More and more medicines are getting targeted. And therefore, can we run our clinical trials more effectively by picking the right patient population for that medicine? So that's where we're using AI.

And so not only are you balancing various R&D projects against each other, but then you're also balancing R&D versus shareholder demands.

Absolutely.

Because the shareholders also are hungry mouths to feed. They want their earnings. And so how do you look at that? How do you balance that out?

It's a balance between short-term and long-term. And I don't think one can take one's eye off the ball on either place because, you know, we give guidance, we have to deliver, you know, what we commit for the year. So that's more the short-term, quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year. But also the long-term because, you know, I mentioned in the beginning, growth investors, people invest in our company because they see that the company is gonna be a consistent grower for the long-term. And in order to consistently grow for the long-term, you have to make investments. So I think a lot of it is making sure investors understand the trade-offs we're making while delivering on the year ahead, also investing for the long-term, and they will be beneficiaries of that growth.

What do you make of governments looking to curb drug pricing? And it's not only in the United States, Japan just cut prices of drugs, including one of your important drugs there. How do you look at that and how do you model that out in terms of what you're going to be delivering?

Yeah, so, you know, the world is definitely dynamically moving, to say the least. In the US, there has been, you know, agreements signed as it relates to the MFN.

What is the MFN?

So the MFN is an agreement we and other pharma companies signed, which is relating the most favored nation. So the US government, so Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera, will get pricing for drugs, net pricing for drugs that is at par with other, you know, wealthy nations and on a GDP adjusted basis. So what that does, I think, is obviously help over time lower costs for new drugs that are coming into the US market. But I think it also forces countries to invest more in their innovative medicines as a portion of their total budget. And that's the case we're making to many of these countries in Europe because they have under-invested in innovative medicines, you know, as a whole, not just our drugs. And that's the case we're making that, you know, you need to increase your spending in innovative medicines to make sure you stay competitive as well in the life science space.

Yeah, maybe talk a little bit more about those global pressures, both in terms of having to manufacture in specific countries, obviously that's a big priority in the United States, but also tariffs. Do you face either one of those pressures?

So, you know, we are probably more blessed than many from that standpoint. And I think it goes back to the COVID days. So you may not recall, but we supplied vaccine, AstraZeneca supplied vaccine during the COVID days.

I remember. It wasn't that long ago.

It wasn't that long ago. And we supplied, you know, over three billion doses across the world. And what we learned, I think, during that whole process was that countries were very interested in, you know, satisfying their needs first before exports, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we took some of that learning from back during the pandemic and decided over time to make our supply chains very regional. So we have 30 plus manufacturing sites all over the world, but we have manufacturing in China that supplies China and Asia. And then we have manufacturing in Europe that supplies Europe and rest of the world. And then we have many manufacturing sites in the US. So we've tried to regionalize some of those supply chains. It's not 100% and it's not perfect, but we were very, I would say we felt that the tariff stuff was manageable because we had already planned this for many years.

A little more than a decade ago, Pfizer wanted to buy AstraZeneca, and now your market cap is what, 280 billion, which is bigger than theirs. Your stock has gone up a lot, Aradhana. Why should investors buy the stock now though? I mean, what's ahead for them in terms of, you know, maybe they feel like they've missed the run-up already?

Yeah, I don't think they've missed the run-up. I think, well, if you just take the ambition we have for 2030, which is 80 billion in revenue and 20 new medicines, we're already halfway there in terms of 10 new medicines. I think there's a lot of growth still to come. The other thing I would say, not only are we global, as I mentioned before, very global compared to, you know, other pharma companies, and therefore, you know, the ups and downs on pricing or other challenges, I think we are built well to weather all of that. And we have a very broad and deep pipeline. So, you know, not everything will work, but I think if things work the way they've been working in the past, I think there's a lot of growth still to come. So a lot more, you know, for people to look forward to.

Aradhana joined AstraZeneca from Alexion Pharmaceuticals at the same time that AstraZeneca was acquiring that company. The move marked a transformational shift for AstraZeneca into rare diseases and was one of the largest drug mergers at the time. Now you came to the company in, what, 2021 when AstraZeneca bought Alexion?

That's right.

It was a $39 billion acquisition. How's that fit going? That was the rare disease company. And how's that fit going?

Very well, actually. I would say the Alexion acquisition has delivered better than expected. The rare disease business has grown substantially. It's now almost, you know, a $9 billion plus business. So it is another leg. Also, we've done a lot of sort of bridges between the two companies from a research standpoint. So scientists are collaborating. Because if you think from a scientific standpoint, many of the pathways and mechanisms may also be relevant to rare diseases. So I think that collaboration is going really well. Alexion used to sell products in 15 to 20 markets. We're now selling the Alexion rare disease product in 70-plus markets. So the global infrastructure that AstraZeneca has, we're leveraging that. So I think the business is doing very well and, you know, fingers crossed, it continues to do well.

And what are some rare diseases, by the way, that Alexion and now AstraZeneca treats? I'm just curious about that.

So some of the diseases we treat are PNH, maybe those names are, you know, atypical. HUS. HPP.

I don't think people know what those stand for or mean.

Probably not a lot.

Just one example.

The one example that maybe people do know is myasthenia gravis. So that is a disease where it actually mostly affects women in sort of their 40s. And it's a muscle weakening disease. So people experience that as, you know, weakness in their muscles, inability to like stand up, you know, have a weakness in muscles in their eyes. So again, inability to focus. So, you know, all of these are sort of rare diseases. Rare disease is anything that has a population of less than 200,000 patients in the entire country. So it's a very, you know, these are patients where, you know, it's even challenging to do clinical trials because you need to find these patients and, you know, it's hard.

And then you have to monetize it and not charge a million dollars a dose, right? So that's very tricky, right?

Yeah.

I wanna wind things up by asking a couple questions about you. It's a UK-based company, but you're mostly based in the United States, although you travel around a lot, right? Tell us about your life.

Yeah, I'm on the road probably seven months of the year.

That's a lot.

It's a lot.

Okay, and so you're visiting what sort of countries and what sort of facilities are visiting then?

So, you know, it's very interesting. Our executive team is very spread out. And because we're so global, I think, and also I think as an executive team, we like to be close to the business. So I don't feel that, okay, you can be in headquarters sort of isolated from, you know, the ground realities. And challenges are different in every market. So what am I traveling for other than sort of board meetings and investors and things? It's, you know, business reviews and markets, you know, maybe engagement in the local market, manufacturing sites, visiting people, you know, meeting different governments. So I think it's very, very important in today's day and age to be close to what's actually happening in different markets. We have a big business in Japan. We have a huge business in China. We have business in the Middle East. Dubai is sort of our headquarters for international region. Europe, we have research sites. We have six global research sites, two in the US, two in Europe, and two in China. So it's all of those.

That's what keeps you on the airplane. And final question, you were an MD in India, Stanford MBA after that. Then you went to work on Wall Street before you went to Alexion. How does that background, Aradhana, inform your thinking about your job?

I think it's, one, it keeps me close to the science, and we are very much a science and innovation-driven company. I actually spent this last weekend till Monday, I was at ASCO, which is the big Congress for oncology in Chicago. So again, why do I need to go to a conference as a CFO? But, you know, I'm really interested in not only innovations we're doing, but innovations that are happening in the field. So one, it helps me be close to the science. And then coming back to the question you asked, how do you make that judgment on capital allocation? You have a $15 billion R&D budget and you have to, you know, make choices. And so understanding the patient need, understanding diseases, understanding the science really helps outside of just the financial. And then I just love what I do.

Makes sense. Aradhana Sarin, CFO of AstraZeneca. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.