First it was a tornado. Now a layoff round has hit Pfizer’s manufacturing facility in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
In one of two planned workforce reductions in North Carolina, Pfizer will cut 60 jobs at the Rocky Mount sterile injectables facility by the end of July, the company disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice (PDF).
Simultaneously, Pfizer intends to let go of 150 employees at its Sanford site in North Carolina this week following a high-profile setback in the New York pharma’s pursuit of gene therapies.
Despite the cuts, the two sites will “definitely remain open,” a Pfizer spokesperson confirmed to Fierce Pharma.
The layoffs come amid a large cost-cutting campaign Pfizer initiated in the fall of 2023. Following the announcement of $4 billion in planned spending reductions last year, Pfizer in May unveiled a new plan to reduce expenses by an additional $1.5 billion by the end of 2027.
The Sanford site serves as a key facility supporting Pfizer’s now-weakened gene therapy ambition. The site received a $100 million investment in 2017 followed by an additional $500 million in 2019, to make the company’s gene therapy programs for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), hemophilia A and hemophilia B.
But in June, the DMD candidate, fordadistrogene movaparvovec, surprisingly failed to move the needle in a phase 3 trial. Plans of cuts at the Sanford site, potentially to the tune of 200 people were floated, WRAL News reported at the time, citing people familiar with the discussions.
Now, 150 employees who were involved in the DMD gene therapy program and other site operations at Sanford will be affected in the layoff round, the Pfizer spokesperson told Fierce Pharma.
On the flip side, Pfizer recently celebrated a phase 3 win for its hemophilia A candidate, giroctocogene fitelparvovec. But the struggle of BioMarin’s FDA-approved Roctavian has put the commercial viability of gene therapy for hemophilia A into question.
Elsewhere, Pfizer in April earned the FDA’s go-ahead for its hemophilia B drug, Beqvez. But the second-to-market product will have to compete with CSL and uniQure’s Hemgenix.
Seeing less value in pursuing gene therapies for rare diseases, Pfizer last year sold a portfolio of preclinical gene therapies to AstraZeneca.
While slimming down in gene therapy, Pfizer recently acquired a nearby Sanford manufacturing facility from Abzena to help its growing portfolio of antibody-drug conjugates. Expected to be fully operational by the end of 2024, Pfizer is expanding the site and has said it plans to employ about 300 employees by 2025, up from the current size of about 100 staffers.
As for Rocky Mount, Pfizer will decommission several manufacturing lines and will shift its large-volume solutions business to a contract manufacturer, according to the company spokesperson.
“Pfizer regularly evaluates its manufacturing network and the changes at our Rocky Mount manufacturing facility are a result of lower projected product demand and ongoing site modernization efforts,” the Pfizer spokesperson said in a statement.
The Pfizer site is billed as one of the largest sterile injectable facilities in the world, with more than 1.4 million square feet of manufacturing space responsible for making nearly a quarter of Pfizer’s sterile injectables—or 8% of all such medicines—used in U.S. hospitals, the company’s website shows.
After the site was damaged by a tornado last July, Pfizer projected some supply limitations throughout 2024.
Manufacturing facilities have fallen victim to Pfizer’s cost-cutting initiatives lately. As part of the first round of business restructuring unveiled in October, Pfizer decided to close two facilities in North Carolina, including one clinical manufacturing facility dedicated to gene therapy tech in Durham, which had just opened in late 2021.