Roughly a year ago, Gilead Sciences revealed that it was laying off about 7% of Kite Pharma’s workforce in a bid to refresh its cell therapy subsidiary. Now, the Foster City, California-based pharma—best known for its HIV medicines—is telegraphing another round of job cuts.
Gilead will lay off 72 staffers in Seattle starting Jan. 17, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification alert filed with the state of Washington. Gilead’s lone Seattle office, which the company is also closing down, focuses on “supporting research and clinical development,” according to the company’s website.
Gilead employed some 230 people in Washington out of a total workforce of 18,000 as of March, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported earlier this year.
“We are closing our Seattle office as part of our efforts to align resources with our long-term strategic goals,” a Gilead spokesperson told Fierce Biotech Thursday. “This also includes moving some teams to different locations.”
As part of the plan, some employees in Seattle will be able to continue working remotely, apply for another position at the company or leverage severance and job placement services offered by Gilead, the spokesperson added.
Meanwhile, the company is also planning to sunset a Kite Pharma facility in Philadelphia by "mid-next year," the spokesperson said. Kite inherited the facility as part of its buyout of next-gen CAR-T developer Tmunity Therapeutics in late 2022.
The developments come shortly after Gilead reported a 7% year-over-year revenue increase to $7.5 billion in 2024’s third quarter. The period was marked by lackluster sales for the company’s cell therapy products, with lymphoma treatment Yescarta seeing sales drop 1% to $387 million and its Tecartus counterpart growing revenues just 2% to $98 million.
Despite threats to Gilead’s oncology franchise from bispecifics and other CAR-T therapies like Bristol Myers Squibb’s Breyanzi, Kite leader Cindy Perettie said last week that the companies weren’t looking to shake up their strategy.
“We're continuing to focus on driving both our class share and our brand share and feel very confident in the plans that we have to date to continue our expansion into the community and elsewhere,” she said on Gilead’s earnings call.
Late last November, Gilead unveiled job cuts for about 7% of Kite’s total workforce.
In a letter sent to staff at the time—and obtained by Fierce Biotech—Perettie previewed a “refreshed business strategy” to right the ship at the cell therapy subsidiary.
“As a result of this careful review, certain functions are reorganizing their team structures to optimize how we deliver on our strategy," the letter said.
Gilead's move in Seattle makes it the latest biopharma to chart a staff reduction in the city this year.
Back in May, Seattle’s AGC Biologics said it would lay off just under 4% of its global workforce—or around 100 employees—as it navigated challenges affecting the CDMO industry. The company confirmed with Fierce Pharma that the cuts would impact staffers in both Seattle and Colorado plus “global functional areas.”
In September, Athira Pharma revealed it would cut around 70% of its staff, including several executives, after its Alzheimer’s disease candidate fosgonimeton failed to beat placebo in a phase 2/3 trial. Athira is based in Bothell, Washington, which is part of the Seattle metropolitan area.
Plus, Astellas Pharma revealed in October that, as part of the opening of a second location for its Seattle-based subsidiary Universal Cells in Japan, 24 Universal Cells roles in the Emerald City were being eliminated. Twelve of those roles are being transferred to and filled by employees at the new Tsukuba site in Japan, an Astellas spokesperson confirmed at the time.