Earlier this month, Gilead Sciences said it planned to lay off 114 workers based out of Immunomedics' former headquarters in Morris Plains, New Jersey.
But Gilead isn’t abandoning the Garden State. Far from it. The company is establishing an East Coast hub at an undisclosed location, also in the northern part of the state, that will “be able to house up to 500 employees once fully operational,” a company spokesman said in an email, confirming a report last week from roi-nj.com.
There will be no manufacturing at the new hub, the company said.
The facility that Gilead is closing in Morris Plains didn’t last long under the company’s watch. The site was gained in the company's 2020 purchase of Immunomedics. The goal of the $21 billion deal was to give Gilead breast cancer drug Trodelvy and provide some much-needed portfolio diversification amid its oncology push.
The layoffs, which will come in three waves this year, were first disclosed (PDF) in a New Jersey Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification report.
For its new hub, Gilead told roi-nj.com that it was looking at three sites in northern New Jersey, which would focus on corporate functions.
“We want our New Jersey site to feel, look and have an employee experience very similar to our headquarters,” Joydeep Ganguly, Gilead’s corporate operations chief, told the business-focused news outlet. “We are building the site for 500 people. It will be one of the largest non-manufacturing investments we have made in a physical site.” '
Word of the new site comes two weeks after Gilead revealed that it bought 27 acres of land around its existing plant in Oceanside, California, to give the company “the ability to bring more manufacturing operations to the area."