Layoffs
2024 was a tough year for the biopharma industry, with several companies cutting hundreds or even thousands of employees. Follow along as BioSpace tracks job cuts and restructuring initiatives throughout 2025.
Roche’s reorganization of Spark Therapeutics is coming more into focus, with nearly 300 employees being let go by the end of this year. Spark also trimmed its staff in 2024.
Although U.S. full-time employees worked an average of 42.9 hours weekly last year, according to Gallup, that wasn’t true for most BioSpace LinkedIn poll respondents. A Karius HR executive discusses a few potential reasons for the longer workweeks.
Following the dramatic late-night resignation of Peter Marks last Friday, Steele, a senior advisor to the division, takes the reins in a department inside an agency beset by cuts, layoffs, and confusion.
Biopharma leaders react to the forced resignation of CBER Head Peter Marks as RFK Jr.’s promised job cuts begin at the FDA; Novo Nordisk presents mixed results from oral semaglutide in cardiovascular disease; the EU’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use declines to recommend Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s drug; and pharma R&D returns grew in 2024.
Organon’s workforce cuts come several months after the company’s loss of exclusivity to its second-largest product, Atozet.
The latest cuts, which are part of a larger reduction of 10,000 at the Department of Health and Human Services, were reportedly underway Tuesday, with CDER Office of New Drugs Director Peter Stein added to the list of casualties.
Cell therapy and oncology–focused Carisma Therapeutics started layoffs late last year. Now the company plans to wind down fully.
The layoffs will take place throughout 2025 and will mostly affect Tenaya’s research and manufacturing operations. The company is continuing to test its hypertrophic cardiomyopathy gene therapy.
Arbutus is also exiting its corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania and will terminate all in-house scientific research. The company’s focus is now an RNAi asset for hepatitis B.
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