Washington Business Journal -- MedImmune Inc. has substantially bumped up the number of personnel it expects to hire this year -- and the biotech giant said it is already nearly halfway to that goal.
The Gaithersburg subsidiary of London-based AstraZeneca PLC said it aims to hire 800 people by the end of this year, a 25 percent staff increase and four times the head count that MedImmune CEO David Mott had indicated as its hiring plans last August.
At that time, he said the company planned to bring on board another 200 researchers each year. Even that number represented a four-fold increase in the hiring rate that Mott said MedImmune could have achieved on its own, if it hadn’t been acquired last year by pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca.
So far, MedImmune said, it’s nearly half-finished with its beefed-up hiring goal. It’s widened its search to such biotech hotspots as San Francisco, Boston, North Carolina and Europe. Mostly in research and development, as well as clinical fields, the new recruits would be spread across MedImmune’s campuses in Gaithersburg, California and the United Kingdom.
MedImmune, which counted 2,500 employees when it was acquired in June 2007, took over last fall another previous AstraZeneca acquisition, U.K.-based Cambridge Antibody Technology Group PLC, bringing the local company’s total employee base closer to 3,000 people by the end of last year.
MedImmune has committed to doubling its own pipeline and contributing to 25 percent of its parent company’s later-stage products by 2010, requiring more scientists on staff.
