LONDON — Britain’s biggest drugmaker says it will only give the greenlight to plans for a £200 million Cambridge research site if ministers go further on NHS spending reforms in their trade negotiations with the United States.

The U.K. has drawn up proposals to increase the amount the state-funded National Health Service is allowed to pay pharmaceutical firms for drugs after intense discussions with officials from the Trump administration.

But AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot is pushing for a bigger increase to the threshold that determines how much the NHS can spend on new medicines — the benchmark used by NICE to judge whether a treatment is worth the cost.

“I will invest where I believe my products are going to be used,” said Soriot in a call with reporters on Thursday, responding to questions about the Cambridge site. “Otherwise, you do trials that lead to nothing, and it’s a frustration for physicians, for patients, and for us.” 

AstraZeneca paused plans for the £200 million Cambridge research center in September. 

Ministers have proposed a 25 percent boost to the NHS’s drug-pricing threshold as part of ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration around looming pharmaceutical tariffs.

The U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. Warren Stephens warned British ministers on Wednesday that American pharmaceutical giants will start to shutter their U.K. operations unless Keir Starmer’s government agrees to pay more for their drugs.

AstraZeneca’s Soriot, who struck a three-year tariff relief deal with the Trump administration last month, wants to push the NHS spending threshold higher so that it can buy drugs costing £40,000-£50,000 per year of healthy life gained, up from around £20,000-£30,000 today. 

“This number has not been adjusted for more than 20 years, so we would need to see a substantial adjustment based on the amount of inflation that has taken place, and that’s the only way to improve access for patients,” he said. 

Soriot also said the government would need to substantially adjust its “clawback” system — known as the Voluntary Scheme for Pricing, Access and Growth (VPAG) — where firms have to pay back part of their revenue if NHS spending on drugs exceeds a cap. 

“If you get a better price  […] but then you get a big rebate later on, it really doesn’t help either,” he said. 

Without these changes, Soriot warned pharmaceutical investment will continue flowing elsewhere, including to the U.S. and China. If things “continued to deteriorate the way they do […] it’s actually possible” that the U.K. may become a country down the line that may only have access to generics and no innovation, he said. 

As British officials seek to negotiate a solution with their U.S. counterparts in Washington this week, ahead of the U.K. budget on Nov. 26, Soriot argued that higher spending now would pay off in the long run.

“Every government has financial constraints, of course, but that’s why I’m saying that those changes will only apply to new products, and the impact on budgets would come over time,” he said, adding that “in the meantime, it would generate investment from pharmaceutical companies.”