nature biotechnology volume 32 NumBeR 8 AuGuST 2014 843

Michael Francisco is a Senior Editor at Nature Biotechnology.

Second-quarter biotech job pictureMichael Francisco

The number of advertised biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector jobs remained steady in the three job databases tracked by Nature

Biotechnology (Tables 1 and 2). Compared with the first quarter of 2014 (Nat. Biotechnol. 32, 497; 2014), biotech listings on Monster and LinkedIn decreased slightly while pharma listings were mixed. Naturejobs saw an increase in both biotech and pharma listings.

In June, Novo Nordisk announced a plan to hire 6,000 new employees in Denmark by 2022, half of whom will work in R&D. The company said the new jobs will create another 15,000 related jobs in the country, owing to the interaction between industry, public-sector research and education.

Sinovac Biotech has been awarded an RMB60 million ($9.6 million) government grant to build a facility in China for production of vaccines against hand, foot and mouth disease. The funding will be provided in several tranches, with RMB20 million ($3.2 million) expected within the year. A new drug application for the vaccine is under review by China’s Food and Drug Administration.

Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Labs will open an incubator facility to accommodate up to 50 emerging companies, called Janssen Labs @South San Francisco, by year’s end. The new incubator will join existing Janssen Labs in San Diego, San Francisco and Boston.

Finally, Qiagen has announced the closing of its Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA site by early 2015. It will invest an additional $10 million to upgrade its manufacturing facilities in Frederick and Germantown, Maryland, USA, bringing to $50 million the amount it has committed to its Maryland facilities over the past two years. Qiagen employs about 550 employees at the three sites.

Other second-quarter downsizings in the life-science industry are shown in Table 3.

Table 1 Who’s hiring? Advertised openings at the 25 largest biotech companies Number of advertised openingsb

Companya Number of employees Monster LinkedIn Naturejobs

Monsanto 21,500 0 10 0

Amgen 18,000 47 68 0

CSL 10,515 0 467 0

Life Technologies 10,000 0 1 0

PerkinElmer 7,500 46 36 0

Bio-Rad Laboratories 7,380 25 11 0

bioMerieux 7,285 41 19 0

WuXi PharmaTech 6,817 13 12 0

Biocon 6,253 0 0 0

Biogen Idec 5,950 0 42 0

Novozymes 5,865 0 7 0

IDEXX Laboratories 5,400 11 37 0

Shire 5,367 48 85 0

Gilead Sciences 5,000 0 51 1

Celgene 4,700 8 95 207

Endo Pharmaceuticals 4,629 0 16 0

Qiagen 3,999 0 3 4

Actelion 2,433 9 2 0

Illumina 2,400 17 38 3

Vertex Pharmaceuticals 2,200 0 12 0

Regeneron

Pharmaceuticals

1,950 0 50 30

Biotest

Pharmaceuticals

1,727 0 44 0

Alexion

Pharmaceuticals

1,373 0 69 0

Albany Molecular

Research

1,329 1 3 0

CK Life Sciences 1,278 0 0 0

Total 266 1,178 245aAs defined in Nature Biotechnology’s survey of public companies (31, 697–703; 2013). bAs searched on Monster.com, LinkedIn.com and Naturejobs.com, 11 July 2014. Jobs may overlap.

Table 2 Advertised job openings at the ten largest pharma companiesNumber of advertised openingsb

Companya Number of employees Monster LinkedIn Naturejobs

Novartis 127,724 51 54 8

Johnson & Johnson 126,600 1,000+ 1,632 2

Sanofi 111,974 272 150 3

GlaxoSmithKline 99,488 1 21 9

Pfizer 91,500 0 64 12

Abbott Laboratories 91,000 0 114 13

Merck & Co. 83,000 12 61 3

Roche 82,089 0 24 10

Bayer HealthCare 55,300 1 7 3

AstraZeneca 51,700 127 52 5

Total 1,464 2,179 68aData obtained from FiercePharma. bAs searched on Monster.com, LinkedIn.com and Naturejobs.com, 11 July 2014. Jobs may overlap.

Table 3 Selected biotech and pharma downsizings

CompanyNumber of employees cut Details

Aeterna Zentaris 25 Will reduce headcount to 65 full-time employees by year

end as part of a program initiated earlier this year to

streamline R&D.

Affymax 3 Affymax’s board has approved a plan to liquidate and

dissolve the company. The company said the estimated

shareholder payout is about $4 million, or “a few cents

per share,” based on 37.5 million shares outstanding as

of 30 April 2014.

Biota

Pharmaceuticals

50 Will reduce headcount by 67% to 25 and close its

Melbourne, Australia facility by 30 June 2015. All of

the cuts will come from Australia, and the remaining 10

Australian employees will move to Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Cytos Biotechnology 24 Will wind down key operational activities, particularly

related to development and manufacturing of CVT003,

effective 31 July 2014.

InVivo Therapeutics

Holdings

14 Will reduce headcount by 28% to 36 and will discon-

tinue development of its hydrogel drug-delivery program,

which was in an early stage of preclinical development.

Novartis NA Will “significantly reduce” its internal discovery efforts

in RNA therapeutics owing to “ongoing challenges with

formulation and delivery and the reality that the current

range of medically relevant targets where siRNA may be

used is quite narrow.” Novartis has 26 full-time employ-

ees in its RNA therapeutics program.

Source: BioCentury. NA, not available

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