Despite a multi-billion-dollar takeover bid from Novo Holdings, contract manufacturer Catalent appears to be continuing with the internal restructuring scheme it unveiled last year.
For more than a hundred of the CDMO’s employees in the United States, that means new job cuts are on the table.
Catalent will lay off approximately 130 staffers at its massive manufacturing and filling plant in Bloomington, Indiana, a company spokesperson confirmed over email Thursday.
The staff reductions are new and unrelated to the roughly 300 positions the company chopped as part of its cost-cutting campaign between October and December 2023.
“As part of Catalent’s commitment to driving long-term sustainable growth, the company has been focusing on increasing efficiencies and reducing costs across our business,” the spokesperson explained in an emailed statement.
Coupled with those efforts, Catalent made the “difficult, but necessary” decision to cut both current and open roles at the Bloomington site, she added.
The spokesperson did not say which types of roles would be affected or when the layoffs would go into effect.
The Bloomington facility is one of three Catalent fill-finish sites—along with facilities in Anagni, Italy, and Brussels, Belgium—that Novo Nordisk is set to acquire for $11 billion. That deal materialized alongside the news that Novo Holdings, which operates under Novo Nordisk’s owner the Novo Nordisk Foundation, will lay out $16.5 billion to acquire Catalent in full.
The merger is expected to close toward the end of 2024, Catalent and Novo Holdings said in early February.
As for Catalent’s restructuring plan, the CDMO laid out the scheme last summer in a bid to reduce costs and consolidate its manufacturing plants. In late 2023, the company extended those plans to include layoffs across both its biologics and pharma and consumer health segments, Catalent explained in a filing.
Catalent’s Bloomington site has had its share of troubles in recent years. Last month, Reuters first reported that an FDA inspection of the facility in the fall of 2023 revealed quality control lapses—and even reports of a “pest” on a manufacturing line.
Prior to the Bloomington site’s most recent wrist slap, the mid-2023 rejection of Regeneron’s high-dose Eylea by the FDA was linked to cleaning and procedural issues at the Indiana plant.