Dive Brief:
- After months of downsizing, Amgen plans to hire 75 people for its Cambridge, MA site, bringing its total Kendall Square workforce to 275 employees.
- Amgen recently announced job cuts and has started layoffs. The company plans to cut about 4,000 employees—roughly 20% of its workforce.
- Amgen, which is the third-largest biotech in the world, aims to improve margin costs by 15% and save up to $1.5 billon by 2018 by cutting jobs and implementing efficiencies.
Dive Insight:
Amgen has been on a mission to ramp up its rate of approvals for pipeline drugs, while saving money be doubling down on research-related costs. It is also focused on rolling out new products. However, the company received bad news this week from the FDA regarding its cancer-killing virus therapy, known as T-vec, for patients with melanoma.
Although Amgen reported positive results with respect to durable response rates in a late-phase clinical trial, as well as improved overall survival rates, there was a high dropout rate, which has led to FDA concerns about the study design and results. Amgen is backtracking and looking at these factors as it continues to pursue approval of T-vec.