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AstraZeneca reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $14.9bn this morning, up roughly 9 per cent at constant exchange rates on the same period a year earlier, with chief executive Pascal Soriot using the print to reaffirm the group’s ambition of $80bn in total revenue by 2030 first set out at the Cambridge investor day in 2024.

Core earnings per share of $2.49 came in three cents ahead of the company-compiled consensus collated by Vara Research, with oncology once again carrying the quarter at $5.9bn (+12 per cent CER). The London-listed shares opened up around 1.7 per cent before settling, valuing the group at just under £180bn and keeping it in close contention with Shell for the top of the FTSE 100 by market capitalisation.

Oncology and the Tagrisso-Imfinzi engine

The quarter leaned heavily on the same franchises that have driven AstraZeneca’s outperformance through the post-pandemic cycle. Tagrisso, the EGFR-mutated lung cancer therapy, added $1.85bn in the quarter (+10 per cent), benefiting from FLAURA2 combination uptake and continued penetration in the Chinese reimbursement formularies despite the volume-based procurement headwind. Imfinzi delivered $1.5bn (+18 per cent), with the AEGEAN regimen in resectable non-small-cell lung cancer now accounting for a steadily growing share of new patient starts in the UK and Germany.

Management struck a notably more cautious tone on Enhertu, the Daiichi Sankyo-partnered antibody-drug conjugate, where US gross-to-net pressure and biosimilar dynamics in HER2-low breast cancer sequencing trimmed quarterly growth to single digits. Soriot, on the analyst call, said the company expected ADC growth to “reaccelerate from the second half” as the DESTINY-Breast09 first-line readout begins to feed into prescribing patterns.

The AI thesis: Isomorphic Labs’ first AZ-tagged molecules

For City analysts, the more telling line in the prepared remarks was Soriot’s confirmation that two molecules originating from the Isomorphic Labs collaboration have now entered formal IND-enabling studies, putting AstraZeneca on track to file its first Investigational New Drug application from an AI-discovered Isomorphic asset within the 2026 calendar year. The collaboration, signed in early 2024 and worth up to $1.3bn in milestone payments across oncology and immunology targets, is the most commercially material AI drug-discovery partnership inside a FTSE 100 company.

“This is the cohort against which the entire generative-biology thesis will be tested in the public market,” Sebastian Skeet, equity analyst at Bernstein, told Clarqo. “AstraZeneca and Isomorphic now have to translate structural prediction confidence into clinical-stage assets, and Q1 was the first quarter where Soriot put a near-term timeline on the page.”

2030 ambition under the City microscope

The $80bn 2030 revenue ambition, which implies a roughly 7 to 8 per cent compound annual growth rate from 2024’s $54.1bn base, is increasingly scrutinised by sell-side teams given the patent cliff facing Tagrisso (US composition-of-matter expiry in 2032) and the more competitive obesity and cardiometabolic landscape now confronting Farxiga. Today’s print, with full-year guidance reiterated at high single-digit to low double-digit revenue growth and core EPS growth in the low double digits, keeps that 2030 trajectory technically on track but leaves limited room for execution slips in the second half.

For Cambridge, where AstraZeneca’s Discovery Centre on the Biomedical Campus remains the largest single private-sector R&D site in the UK, the quarter is also a quiet vote of confidence in the British science base at a moment when the Treasury is once again being lobbied to underwrite the UK’s life-sciences industrial strategy.

Finance & Markets Correspondent
Covers: Finance, capital markets, technology investing

David Whitmore covers the intersection of capital and code — the funding rounds, market structures and policy moves that shape how money flows through the technology economy.