Dive Brief:
- Biogen will eliminate over 200 positions at its Cambridge and Somerville locations, laying off 104 employees while about half will go to work for Lexington, MA-based Brammer Bio as part of Biogen's planned closure of its Cambridge manufacturing facility, the Boston Business Journal reports.
- The biotech will transfer the manufacturing facility, along with a warehouse in Somerville, to Brammer Bio, the report said.
- While Biogen is trimming back manufacturing in Cambridge, the company last year announced plans to build a manufacturing plant in Solothurn, Switzerland to support its pipeline. Around the same time, Biogen inked a deal to take over Japanese drugmaker Eisai's manufacturing campus in North Carolina.
Dive Insight:
2016 has been a tumultuous year for Biogen.
In May, the company announced plans to spin off its hemophilia business — headlined by the drugs Eloctate and Alprolix — into a separate, public company. Now called BioVerativ, the spin-off will also take over development on two collaboration gene therapy programs that Biogen began working on with Sangamo BioSciences in 2014.
Earleir this year, Biogen announced CEO George Scangos, who had championed the hemophilia program, would step down as head of the biotech. As of yet, no successor has been named to oversee the slimmed-down company.
All the while, Biogen's mainstay multiple sclerosis drug Tecfidera (dimethyl fumarate) has come under new patent pressure, which threatens a lucrative revenue stream for the company.
The most recent layoffs come about a year after Biogen announced a major restructuring that eliminated 11% of its workforce and trimmed a number of projects from the company's pipeline.
Biogen did not respond to repeated requests for comment before publication.