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.

The FDA is mired in uncertainty with some staffers losing their jobs over the weekend and more potentially to come, vaccines and psychedelic therapies could be facing very different futures under newly confirmed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Moderna continues its downward revenue slide and Merck, Regeneron, BMS and more face strong patent headwinds.

In its fourth-quarter earnings report, Moderna’s revenue was down substantially from 2023. Separately, media reports reveal anticipated cuts to the company’s digital team.

Encoded’s layoffs will mostly affect its technology and early-stage research and development functions. The move is expected to keep the biotech operational well into 2026.

Just a few months after Vir Biotechnology lost an emergency authorization for its COVID-19 antibody, Marianne de Backer stepped in as CEO to answer a critical question: What’s next?

French biotech Inventiva’s layoffs and pipeline shift are expected to help keep the company operational into the second half of 2026.

The headcount reduction will save money that the company will use in developing mavorixafor, its CXCR4 antagonist that last year received FDA approval to treat WHIM syndrome, in the larger patient population with chronic neutropenia.

Bristol Myers Squibb will make even deeper cuts to its organization to enhance efficiencies as it faces the 2028 loss of exclusivity for its blockbuster drugs Eliquis and Opdivo.

Most employers are expecting to hire this year, according to BioSpace data and Recruitment Manager Greg Clouse, who noted that companies are looking to do more than just replace people lost to turnover.

ImmunityBio will part with 10 employees this quarter. Last fall, it cut 31 employees. The moves come as the biotech works to advance Anktiva in non-small cell lung cancer.