Following the announcement of a large layoff round in April and a major restructuring initiative unveiled earlier this month, Genentech is sending more jobs to the chopping block.
The Roche subsidiary will lay off 93 employees in South San Francisco starting in early October, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) alert in California. The downsizing campaign will kick off in the fall and run through December.
The job cuts will affect a range of roles, including multiple scientists, quality professionals, project managers, IT specialists and one vice president, according to the WARN report. On Genentech’s website, the company notes that its large South San Francisco campus encompasses scientific research, manufacturing and “various business functions.”
Earlier this month, Genentech told Fierce Biotech it would close its cancer immunology research department located in South San Francisco, with the specific research functions destined to be merged with the company’s molecular oncology research.
“We regularly evaluate our operations to ensure we remain well-positioned to meet the needs of patients today while continuing to deliver innovative new medicines in the future,” a Genentech spokesperson told Fierce Biotech over email on Aug. 28. “As part of these ongoing evaluations, we identified certain positions across Genentech that are no longer needed in support of our future work.”
The spokesperson added that Genentech is committed to treating its employees—and especially those hit by the layoff round—with the “utmost compassion, care and respect.”
News of the latest cuts follows several other downsizing rounds initiated by Genentech over the past year.
Back in April, the company said it would let go of 436 people, or about 3% of its staff, across several departments, beginning in June. In March 2023, several hundred Genentech employees’ jobs were affected when the company closed up shop at a production facility in South San Francisco.
At the time, 265 employees at the plant were set to lose their jobs, though “that number is dropping a bit every day,” Andi Goddard, Roche’s senior vice president of pharma technical operations and global head of quality and compliance, had told Fierce.
Instead of laying off the entire team, most staffers at the site transitioned to a new clinical supply center in the same city, Goddard said.
The company’s more recent announcement to close its cancer immunology research department will impact “a limited number” of employees, a Genentech spokesperson told Fierce.
“This decision was based on our on-the-ground assessment of how best to seize current scientific opportunities in the field, rather than on any Roche-wide decisions about cancer immunology,” the spokesperson had said. “We continue to believe cancer immunology is an important part of our oncology programs.”