Gilead Sciences is laying off 36 people as part of a rethink that saw the Big Pharma scrap plans to expand a biologics facility in California.
At one point, the company had been planning to expand its facility in Oceanside, California. Gilead dropped that strategy early last year, choosing instead to move the team’s responsibilities more than 400 miles up the California coast to Foster City. At the time, Gilead said most of its biologics teams would make the move without saying how many employees, if any, would be laid off.
The pharma revealed the extent of the layoffs in a WARN notice last week, with a Gilead spokesperson putting the redundancies in the context of the decision to co-locate the biologics development and manufacturing teams with their counterparts in R&D.
“This includes transitioning most of our Gilead Biologics roles, most of which are currently in Oceanside, to Foster City,” the spokesperson told Fierce. “The goal is to have this transition completed by 2027 at the latest.”
Gilead uses the Oceanside facility for commercial retroviral vector production and clinical manufacturing as well as process development of its biologics candidates. Foster City is home to Gilead’s headquarters along with sites that handle manufacturing and R&D activities such as process chemistry research and formulation development work.
The company ended last year with about 17,600 employees, down from 18,000 at the end of 2023. The dip in head count followed a period of fast growth in which the workforce climbed from 13,600 at the end of 2020 to the peak hit in 2023.
Gilead’s growth and slight contraction covers a period in which the drugmaker continued to try to expand beyond its stronghold in virology. The diversification drive has hit some setbacks, notably as oncology candidates have failed to live up to expectations, but Gilead remains committed to the strategy.