In the first major workforce reduction disclosed under new CEO Belén Garijo, Sanofi is laying off 229 employees from legacy Blueprint Medicines in Massachusetts as part of a post-acquisition integration.
The cuts, detailed in a state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice, comes roughly a year after the French pharma giant closed its $9.1 billion buyout of Blueprint to bag the rare immunology drug Ayvakit and other KIT inhibitor pipeline candidates.
Blueprint counted 682 full-time employees as of April 15, 2025, according to its last quarterly report filed before Sanofi announced the deal in June 2025.
Alongside the headcount reductions, Sanofi is consolidating its footprint in Cambridge, Massachusetts, closing two legacy Blueprint sites, including the biotech’s previous global headquarters located at 45 Sidney St., Boston Business Journal reports. The remaining Blueprint employees will report to Sanofi’s campus at Cambridge Crossing, which opened in 2022 after the French drugmaker consolidated multiple nearby facilities in the Boston area.
In a statement to Fierce Pharma, a Sanofi spokesperson framed the planned changes as part of “thoughtful organizational decisions to align our structure with our long-term business priorities and the needs of our commercial portfolio and pipeline.
“These decisions were made carefully to position the organization for future success while continuing to deliver for patients,” the spokesperson added. “Many Blueprint employees are joining Sanofi. Those affected by these decisions have already been informed and we will continue to provide multiple avenues of support through their transitions.”
According to the WARN notice, the cuts will happen between October 2026 and June 2027.
Since the acquisition, several former Blueprint senior leaders have left before the latest mass layoffs. Kate Haviland, previously CEO of Blueprint, adopted the board chair role at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based cell therapy company GC Therapeutics at the turn of 2025. Around the same time, Percy Carter, Ph.D., who was Blueprint’s chief scientific officer, joined Pfizer as the new leader of preclinical and translational sciences.
Also at the beginning of 2026, Blueprint’s former chief commercial officer, Philina Lee, Ph.D., became CEO of AdvanCell, a radiopharmaceuticals player backed by Sanofi Ventures, which just participated in the biotech’s recent $315 million series D.
Post-acquisition consolidations represent a standard playbook for wringing out redundancies and cutting costs among pharmas. But for Sanofi, the Blueprint cuts could be a prelude to a broader strategic shakeup. With Garijo’s arrival as CEO on May 1, 2026, following Paul Hudson’s ouster, an even larger corporate overhaul may be on the horizon.
In her first earnings call as Sanofi CEO on July 30, Garijo said she has to “fully acknowledge the challenges” confronting Sanofi “and the need to act with a sense of urgency in order to deliver a strategy that improves the perspective of the mid- and long-term growth.”
The new Sanofi chief aims to build on the “commitment to drive a culture of greater accountability, high performance, and once again, faster, more agile, fact-based decision-making.”
It’s also not uncommon for new pharma CEOs to make big changes. GSK’s Luke Miels recently unveiled a $2.5 billion cost-savings initiative about half a year into his CEO tenure. While specific numbers of job cuts have not been revealed, the company is targeting process simplification, procurement, mature portfolio and the supply chain to achieve that goal.