Construction of AstraZeneca's northern headquarters of China has started in the Beijing E-town Economic and Technological Area (BDA), with the facility intended as an innovation center and park to gather biochemistry enterprises to support upgrading of bio-tech and the big health industry in the BDA.

AstraZeneca is a global science-led biopharmaceutical company located in Cambridge, the UK. It has branches in over 100 countries and production bases in 16 countries. AstraZeneca came to China in 1993, providing more than 40 kind of innovative medicines in pneumology, cardiovascular, metabolism, oncology, gastrology and nephropathy. With more than $1 billion invested in China, sales of AstraZeneca products have reached $49 billion.

Bio-chemistry and the big health industry are two of four major industries in the BDA. In 2018, the roxadustat capsule was jointly researched and developed by AstraZeneca and FibroGen, a biotech company from the US with its China headquarters located in the BDA. Roxadustat is a chronic renal anemia medicine and the first innovative medicine of that type to access the market in Europe and the Americas.

The BDA has introduced 145 policies about "Two Zones" construction, covering industrial development, finance and innovation, space resources guarantees and upgrades, talents and government review and approval. The AstraZeneca northern headquarters will be in charge of operation management and markets in northern, northeast China and the Beijing and Tianjin areas. Also, it will promote development and technology promotion in the biochemistry and big health industries in an advisory capacity.

At present, over 1,500 biochemical companies are settled down in BDA. They include biotech enterprises such as Bayer, Sanofi, Daiichi Sankyo; medical imaging diagnosis and treatment enterprises such as GE, Varian, Shimadzu; and orthopaedic enterprises such as Smith&Nephew, Zimmer and Biomet; as well as Chinese traditional medicine enterprises such as TRThealth and TRTkj.