Expansion continued across the biopharma industry in the third quarter of 2022. In the Boston area, Eli Lilly plans to lease 334,000 square feet for its recently launched Institute for Genetic Medicine. Takeda leased 600,000 square feet for an R&D site in Kendall Square, and AstraZeneca is readying a site in Cambridge for 1,500 employees of its Alexion subsidiary. Not all the news was good, however. Biogen will lay off 1,000 employees to shave $1 billion in costs owing to disappointing sales of its Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm (aducanumab).

WuXi AppTec has broken ground on a site in Middletown, Delaware for its contract research and manufacturing subsidiary WuXi STA. The 190-acre plant will be the company’s second in the US and will create 500 positions by 2026. And Thermo Fisher has opened a $105 million, 400,000-square-foot manufacturing facility near Nashville, Tennessee, part of a $650 million investment to build sites across the US, UK and China in 2022.

In Europe, Merck KGaA continued its expansion by announcing a $127-million investment to increase the production of COVID-19 vaccines and other therapeutics at its site in Molsheim, France. The investment aims to create 800 jobs in the next six years. “This investment is an integral component of our plans to expand our global manufacturing footprint and deliver superior customer value across the globe,” said Belén Garijo, CEO.

AbbVie announced it will lay off 99 employees from an Allergan manufacturing site in Irvine, California. AbbVie bought Allergan for $63 billion in 2019. Finally, Bristol Myers Squibb will lay off 261 employees in San Diego as part of its acquisition of Turning Point Therapeutics.

Advertised biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector jobs in the job databases tracked by Nature Biotechnology rose sharply in the third quarter of 2022 (Tables 1 and 2) compared with the previous quarter (Nat. Biotechnol. 40, 1299, 2022).

Table 1 Who’s hiring? Advertised openings at the 25 largest biotech companies
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Table 2 Advertised job openings at the ten largest pharma companies
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