Novartis axes 175 jobs globally in operations reshuffle
pharmafile | October 5, 2016 | News story | Business Services, Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing |
Novartis has announced it is to shut down parts of its research operations in Switzerland and China and cutting 175 jobs in an effort to cut costs and centralise its drug discovery programmes.
The company’s biologics group in Shanghai will be closed and its 18 positions lost with plans to maintain much of these operations at its newly opened $1 billion 500-strong R&D facility.
The company will relocate its tropical disease research arm from Singapore to a California facility which currently houses NIBR’s infectious diseases research team. Novartis specified that malaria research will continue at the new facility.
These moves come after the company, which employs 120,000 globally, announced it would be revamping its pharmaceutical division in May. In August, it disbanded its stand-alone Cell and Gene Therapy unit, eliminating 120 jobs while reinforcing its oncology business with programmes including chimeric antigen replacement therapy.
In total, the company is axing 73 positions from the closure of its Esbatech facility near Zurich, 84 jobs in Singapore and 18 in Shanghai. However, the company revealed in a statement that it plans to consolidate research oversight within its Swiss HQ in Basel and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) near Boston, creating 20 to 25 new positions:
“The creation of a unified early discovery research group based in Basel, Switzerland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, will be closely integrated with NIBR’s drug discovery teams around the world.”
The company also plans to build two new “centres of excellence” for bio-therapeutic research in Basel and Cambridge, designed to research new therapies derived from living organisms.
Matt Fellows
