We recognise our responsibility to ensure that we effectively balance our drive for innovation with sound ethical practice.
Bringing a new medicine to market is a long and complex process. It can take more than 10 years of research and development, involving a wide range of scientific skills and state of the art technologies.
The work centres on establishing how well a potential new medicine works on disease and the living body. This means it necessitates some areas of study that are understandably of particular public interest (animal research or clinical trials, for example).
We are committed to delivering innovation responsibly by setting and working to consistently high ethical standards across all aspects of our research activity.
It starts with our Code of Conduct, which requires that our research is conducted in accordance with all relevant external laws and regulations. Our Code also requires compliance with our Bioethics Policy, which describes our commitment beyond legal compliance and defines the ethical standards, principles and behaviours governing all our research and development activity worldwide. We reviewed and strengthened our Bioethics Policy in 2008 and during 2009 we ran targeted staff training to ensure that the requirements are understood.
Our commitment to high ethical standards of R&D applies not only to our R&D functions (globally and in our marketing companies), but also to supporting functions such as purchasing, business development and legal. Our standards also apply to all third parties who carry out work on our behalf.
Governance and compliance
Our Science Policy and Practice Council is a cross-functional group of senior R&D leaders (including MedImmune) chaired by the Executive Vice President of Development and the Executive Vice President of Discovery. The Council provides leadership and direction on science policy matters to ensure that we continue to have clear accountabilities throughout the organisation.
The Board’s Science Committee provides assurance to the AstraZeneca Board regarding the quality and integrity of our science-based research and development activities. As needed, this Committee also reviews, together with other external experts, important bioethics issues that the company faces, and agrees appropriate policies on behalf of the Board.
Our R&D compliance organisations work to ensure that our R&D communities worldwide understand and comply with all relevant external legislation and regulatory requirements, and with our own internal policies. This includes the implementation of ongoing programmes for continuous improvement embedded in R&D business processes, training, auditing and monitoring, and ongoing assessment of key compliance risks.
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