Merck & Co. Slashes 148 Jobs, Shuts Down Screening Plant in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
August 15, 2016 (Last Updated: 7:00 p.m. PT)
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
PHILADELPHIA – One month following Merck ’s announcement it was cutting more than 300 jobs from east coast locations, the first solid numbers regarding impact are in. Merck’s North Wales campus in Pennsylvania will lose the 148 employees.
The positions will be eliminated by Sept. 12, the Philadelphia Business Journal reported, citing a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the state’s department of labor. The North Wales drug compound screening facility is set to close. However, the company still maintains a strong presence in the area, employing more than 12,000 people in Pennsylvania, the Journal noted.
In an earlier version of this story, BioSpace had incorrectly related the cuts in North Wales to job cuts in the company’s research organization. However, Lainie Keller, a spokesperson for the company said the cuts in North Wales are results of changes within the company’s commercial organization. She said those who are displaces are members of field-based sales teams and other headquarters-based employees.
“It’s important to note that this action is separate and distinct from the organizational changes we are making within our discovery, pre-clinical and early development (DPEP) area in Merck Research Laboratories to enable earlier access to emerging external science and technology to augment our leading discovery and development capabilities. Those changes include increasing our investment in exploratory biology in areas where biomedical research is converging, specifically in Cambridge, Mass. and the San Francisco Bay area, Calif.,” Keller said in an email.
Those changes Keller said will result in a workforce reduction from its Kenilworth and Rahway, New Jersey sites. Hard numbers for those cuts have not yet been reported.
“We are not providing a breakdown of the changes or specific numbers of impacted employees in DPEP at this time, but note that this includes separations and employee moves to other sites,” Keller said.
One key aspect the Boston area has over places like Philadelphia is access to venture capitalists, at least that’s how representatives of the life sciences industry from both states see it. Investors are looking for drug companies to have a greater success of commercialization of a product, rather than financing scientific research for the sake of science, Chris Molineaux of Pennsylvania Bio told Philly.com in July.
The money factor could explain why Merck announced plans to open two new facilities, one in Massachusetts and one California. In July, Merck announced it planned to open a microbiome R&D site site in Cambridge, with a focus on “on emerging science, agnostic of therapeutic area.” In July, the company announced it was setting up a new West Cost headquarters in the Bay Area. It secured temporary headquarters while it searches for a more permanent location. Merck’s presence in South San Francisco will put the company in close proximity to other notable pharma giants, including Roche ’s Genentech , Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson .
Merck isn’t the only company to shift employees out of the Pennsylvania area and move them to the Bay State. A year ago, Shire PLC moved 500 R&D and sales jobs to suburban Boston from Chesterbrook, Penn. Also London-based AstraZeneca has shifted jobs from Pennsylvania to Boston.