September 21, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
ZUIRCH – Nestle SA, the parent company of Galderma Laboratories, will terminate up to 450 jobs at a research and development facility in southern France, Reuters reported this morning. The job cuts are part of a strategic plan to make the skin-care business more efficient, according to the report.
The planned cuts will leave Galderma, which came under the Nestle umbrella in 2014, with about 100 employees at the site in Sophia Antipolis, which is near Nice. Galderma employs about 6,000 people worldwide, with five research-and-development centers located in France, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.S. and Japan.
The cuts come about a month after Nestle said it was closing a Switzerland skin cream factory. About 190 people are expected to lose their jobs from that decision, Reuters said.
Just three years ago, Nestle made a big push into skin care. The company said it intended to open up 10 R&D sites and inject about $350 million into dermatological research. At the time, the company intended that approximately 40 percent of its dermatological line would be prescription drugs. The bulk of its skin care revenues would be from cosmetics, creams and some surgical therapies.
Nestle, Reuters said, is looking at diving deeper into prescription medications as treatments for some dermatological conditions are “moving away from creams towards injections or products taken orally.” To spur that along, the company is looking to combine prescription drug development into one single research center, Reuters said. When that site is selected, Nestle said some of those people who are losing their jobs in southern France can apply for positions at the new facility.
The push into dermatological lines was a way for the company to “counter a slowdown” in its food business, Reuters noted.
Just last year, Galderma, which has its U.S. headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, celebrated multiple product launches and expanded its headquarters by the addition of more than 400 jobs. Over a period of 20 months spanning 2014 to 2016, Galderma launched nine products, including Cetaphil Men and Baby product lines, prescription Soolantra (ivermectin) Cream, Epiduo Forte (adapalene and benzoyl peroxide) Gel, Restylane Silk and Restylane Lyft. At the end of 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved two Galderma products, Restylane Refyne and Restylane Defyne, for the treatment of nasolabial folds or “laugh lines.”
Earlier this month, the company released a pooled analysis of four Galderma-sponsored studies evaluating the use of topical therapies for the treatment of inflammatory papules and pustules of rosacea. The analysis indicated that rosacea patients who achieve a score of “clear,” not only experience a more complete reduction in inflammatory lesions compared with “almost clear” patients, but also an extended time to relapse that is associated with improved quality of life.
