Diego Urdaneta/AFP/Getty Images Brexit vote sets off race to seat European Medicines Agency Sweden was first out of the gate; expect others to come out today.

LONDON — A race to house the European Medicines Agency will begin in earnest after Britain voted to leave the European Union today.

The result means the EMA will no longer be able to continue its operations from London, and medicines will need an additional, costly, regulatory process to launch their products in Britain as well as in EU member countries.

Officials in Italy, as drugmakers in Sweden and Denmark, have all expressed interest in taking over as host country.

While suspense now hangs in the air at the EMA’s shiny Canary Wharf office, its executive director Guido Rasi said recently he has no preference as to where they should go.

A French medicines evaluation official said given the high volume of committee meetings requiring experts’ input from throughout the union, it is paramount to choose a city with excellent inter-EU connections.

“Like London, Paris, Amsterdam,” the source posited, adding that Berlin was surprisingly poorly connected.

And in the current austere times, it would need to be a city that’s also not too expensive, the source suggested.

“There’s probably not that many cities in Europe where you have the same facilities to reach it from all over Europe,” as London, and while Paris is “a very nice place to stay” it might be more expensive to visit than other cities, the source said.

Austere times may not have been on the EMA’s mind when it signed a long lease in 2014 on its newly built office in the financial district, at an annual cost of €19.4 million. It houses as many as 840 of the world’s most respected regulatory and scientific experts, including those working full and part-time.

But only 7 percent of the workforce come from the U.K.

However, it may come as some relief to those at the agency that there will be a two-year period before any relocation decision is taken.

For Luca Pani, director general of Italy’s drugs agency AIFA, he is confident his country is best suited to the task.

This is because it’s among the top EU exporters of high quality drugs, it’s leading the way in real-world registries and health technology assessments, and there is a building ready to house the EMA — Milan’s 2015 EXPO — he argued.

He also noted that the current director of the EMA, Rasi, is Italian and before moving to London spent his whole career in AIFA.

“We are firmly convinced that Italy would make an ideal candidate to host the European Medicine agency,” in the event of a Brexit, he told POLITICO earlier this year.

Sweden’s pharmaceutical industry was the first to jump into the race to house the EMA, with a call for a campaign push in its trade group magazine. It touted the country’s expertise in life sciences and home to the Karolinska Institute.

This sparked Denmark’s interest, and its industry members’ organization put out a similar call to action.

Similarly the trade group listed its large medical research community and strong presence of international big pharma, plus home grown firms like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck.

But neither Sweden nor Denmark’s regulators or policymakers have so far commented.

Now that there is a result, expect countries that want the EMA to begin drawing up their pitches for the powerful agency — a one-stop-shop for drugmakers, where licensing approval allows marketing throughout the bloc.

But for the life sciences industry, a time of uncertainty now awaits.

What will happen to drugs close to development completion in the next two years? How will dossiers be managed during the disruption? Will drug launches be delayed? When should they begin using the MHRA for U.K. licenses?

All these questions will need to be answered, slowly, in the coming two years.

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