AstraZeneca’s $1.5 billion cost-savings drive has taken a toll on its U.S. workforce. The British pharma has cut about 600 jobs from its respiratory and immunology commercial teams in the U.S., Bloomberg reports.
Not all those employees affected will leave AZ—some are expected to be reassigned to other positions within the company.
At least a portion of the staffers were detailing asthma drugs Breztri and Airsupra, per Bloomberg, both of which have had rather stalled market performance lately.
Despite an FDA label expansion in April from COPD to asthma, Breztri’s U.S. sales in the third quarter only increased 2% year over year to $170 million. All the same, AZ’s biopharmaceuticals business chief Ruud Dobber said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call that the new indication has seen “rapid uptake.”
Compared with the three-drug inhaler Breztri, the two-drug Airsupra performed even worse with only $43 million U.S. sales in Q3, down 3% year over year.
In AZ’s respiratory and inflammatory disease portfolio, the rising star these days is biologic Tezspire in partnership with Amgen. The first-in-class TSLP-targeted drug recently aced a phase 3 trial in eosinophilic esophagitis, looking to add a third indication beyond asthma and chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps.
In addition to cutting jobs internally, AZ also pulled back its partnership with the contract sales organization Syneos Health in the U.S., Bloomberg reports.
The job reductions come as AZ in October launched a restructuring, aiming to save $1.5 billion in annual costs by 2029. Under that initiative, AZ is redirecting resources to pipeline growth. During a press call, CFO Aradhana Sarin said that the overhaul will not result in a net reduction in AZ’s workforce.
“You don’t spend $1.5 billion without creating jobs,” CEO Pascal Soriot added on the call. “So right there, you see that there will be changes. It’s more reallocation of resources across the pipeline and across the world. In the end, we are still a growing company, and the idea is not to shrink the company. The opposite, actually.”
The cuts in the U.S. respiratory and immunology unit are unlikely to be the company’s last. On the October press call, Sarin said that the three-year cost-savings plan is not about any one particular area but a rebalance of the portfolio and the talents.
“There will definitely be some impact in certain areas,” she said, “but there’ll also be growth opportunities, reskilling, upskilling of employees, opportunities for new roles, and this is all in different areas.”
AZ has expanded significantly under Soriot’s leadership—the British pharma was one of only three large pharma companies that have consistently expanded their workforce since 2021, according to a recent Fierce Pharma tally.
But like its Big Pharma peers, multiple key losses of market exclusivity are creeping up on AZ. And a handful of high-profile clinical failures, such as Ionis-partnered heart disease candidate Wainua and the PD-1xCTLA-4 bispecific cancer program volrustomig, have added wrinkles to AZ’s near- to mid-term growth plans, even though management maintains that it’s on track to achieve $80 billion in 2030 sales.