* Most marketed and pipeline drugs invented elsewhere
* Global drug companies agnostic in sourcing best science
* $106 bln Pfizer bid stirs up political storm on job fears
By Ben Hirschler
LONDON, May 11 (Reuters) - How British is AstraZeneca? With a French chief executive, Swedish chairman, 40 percent of its sales in the United States and 87 percent of its staff overseas, the answer is not simple.
Formed from an Anglo-Swedish merger 15 years ago, even its roots are only half British. Yet a $106 billion takeover bid from U.S. group Pfizer has forced politicians at Westminster to line up in defence of British jobs and science.
The pharmaceuticals group, which is fighting the approach, is an important science anchor for Britain and has close ties to top universities. However, it gets a dwindling portion of medicines from its UK laboratories.
That reflects the realities of the modern drugs industry, in which companies chase the best science, regardless of geography.
Of the top 10 medicines sold by AstraZeneca, three - all for cancer - were invented in its labs near Manchester, four came from Sweden, one from its U.S. research site, one from the U.S. biotech industry and one from Japan.
The Japanese drug, cholesterol fighter Crestor, was acquired from Shionogi and is now the group's biggest seller.
Future drug sales will rely even less on its British lab work. Only one of the 13 experimental medicines in the pipeline that AstraZeneca management highlighted when it laid out its defence was invented in-house.
The rest flow from acquisitions and licensing deals that AstraZeneca has struck in recent years with U.S. companies such as Pearl Therapeutics, FibroGen and Amgen, as well as some smaller British biotech firms.
Many of the most promising new drugs come from the Maryland-based biotech business MedImmune, which AstraZeneca acquired for $15.6 billion in 2007 in a deal that was slammed at the time by investors as a waste of money.
"It is difficult to really pinpoint the nationality of a drug company today," said Patrick Flochel, global pharmaceutical sector leader at Ernst & Young.
"Is it where it was originally born or the language they speak or where it is headquartered or where it pays most of its taxes or where most of the employees come from? In many ways, pharma companies are more American than anything else because that's the biggest market."
Pfizer's attempt to pull off the largest foreign takeover of a British company has created a political storm. Many scientists and some politicians have said its record of slashing jobs after previous deals will undermine a vital high-tech sector.