Thursday, February 2, 2012

AstraZeneca layoffs may hit Mass. R&D operation

By Julie M. Donnelly, Boston Business Journal

Drug maker AstraZeneca plc (NYSE: AZN) has announced it would reduce its head count of 61,000 by 7,300 over the next three years, including research and development cuts that may hit the company’s facility in Waltham.

The restructuring is in response to anticipated revenue declines due to generic competition for some of its top drugs, including the antipsychotic drug Seroquel, which loses patent protection next month. The 7,300 jobs cuts, disclosed Thursday as part of AstraZeneca’s 2011 earnings release, include 1,500 U.S. operations and sales jobs that were previously announced, but also include between 80 and 220 newly announced research jobs.

“Research and development personnel have been informed of the cuts, but actual decisions on which positions will be eliminated have not been made yet,” AstraZeneca spokesman Tony Jewell said. “We have research facilities in Waltham, Wilmington (Delaware), Gaithersburg (Maryland) and in California, so it is impossible to know how many jobs in Massachusetts will be affected.”

In a statement, AstraZeneca estimated the new restructuring program will provide $1.6 billion in annual benefits by the end of 2014, at an estimated total cost of $2.1 billion. AstraZeneca’s 2011 profit was $10 billion, up from $8.1 billion in the previous year. But the improved performance was largely due to a $1.5 billion gain from the sale of its dental subsidiary, Astra Tech, and the company has warned of a difficult year ahead.

AstraZeneca announced a partnership in December with Enlight Biosciences LLC, a pre-competitive Boston research consortium founded by venture firm PureTech Ventures in 2008. The collaboration is designed to foster early-stage technology to enable researchers to make breakthrough drugs more cheaply and efficiently.

In May 2011, AstraZeneca told Massachusetts officials that it would lay off 135 workers in its Westborough manufacturing facility, beginning on May 31 and continuing on an intermittent basis throughout the end of 2011. The layoff was part of a worldwide restructuring that was announced in 2010 and which included a total of 8,550 layoffs.