Free Newsletter
Pfizer outlines deep cuts in R&D shakeup
Free newsletter via e-mail
Tools
There are new details on the impact of Pfizer's big R&D shakeup are coming in from around the world this morning. There's still no word on exactly how many of the 14,500 people working in research for Wyeth and Pfizer will be laid off. But the company said those cuts would make up a "considerable" segment of the 15 percent job cuts being planned across the board. Overall, Pfizer is shuttering 35 percent of all its global R&D space.
New Jersey is being hit hard, losing Wyeth's Princeton research center and the 450 workers who have jobs there. Most will be laid off. That's one of six R&D facilities being closed. Other operations in New York, North Carolina and the UK are also on the chopping block. Wyeth's Collegeville, PA center--its longtime pharmaceutical headquarters--is being downsized.
The reorganization will have little impact on Pfizer's La Jolla, CA R&D operations, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. A Pfizer spokesperson told the newspaper that the company anticipates little change on the campus, which will be the center of the global giant's cancer research work.
Wyeth's lab in Cambridge, MA will concentrate on inflammation, and a Wyeth facility in Pearl River, NY will do vaccine research. Workers in Groton, CT will be responsible for diseases such as Alzheimer's and diabetes. They'll be joined by employees transferred in from a New London facility, which is being closed. And a research facility in Sandwich in the UK will concentrate on pain.
"We have positioned them to tap into internal and external science (resources) on the West Coast, the East Coast, in Europe and at our Shanghai (China) research center," said Mikael Dolsten, president of research and development for vaccines and for biotech drugs.
- read the story from Reuters
- check out the piece from the Star-Ledger
- here's the story from the San Diego Union-Tribune
- and here's the report from the Philadelphia Inquirer
Related Articles:
Pfizer plans massive cuts in sweeping R&D reorg
Total Pfizer jobs cut since 2005: 30,900
Pfizer R&D czars big on collaboration, quiet on cuts
Pfizer/Wyeth merger could eliminate $3B, R&D jobs
Comments
By Anonymous | Posted 4:17pm | November 10, 2009
If industry pundits wonder why productivity is down, just look at this article which is not unique. Merger after merger has gutted the research work force. Whereas we used to have maybe 45 companies with hundreds of researchers, we now have a more "efficient" research society. All those guys in the sales department will never find a new drug. It is not the FDA slowing progress down, it is the merger maniacs of the last 2 decades that are all quite rich but who have no idea how to find new drugs. They, in fact, have killed the fatted calf.
By Anonymous2 | Posted 10:08pm | November 10, 2009
If this a strategic operating cost reduction measure that will not affect R&D and reduce cost of the pharmaceuticals, it is an important model for the government to cut its own work force rapidly so that the dead wood, redundancies and the bureaucracy is reduced to bare bones and deficit reduction can be achieved. It is also good news for biotechs which can be the innovation engines to produce new biopharmaceuticals.
