First-quarter biotech job picture

The turn of the year brought a flurry of new facilities announcements. New Brunswick, NJ–based Johnson & Johnson launched not one but two business incubators: JLABS@TMC, housed within the Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute in Houston, will initially house 21 companies with capacity for 30 more. And Janssen Pharmaceutica and Johnson & Johnson Innovation's JLINX incubator will host up to 20 startups at Janssen's campus in Beerse, Belgium. JLINX will focus on human microbiome research, according to J&J.

General Electric's GE Healthcare unit is partnering with Ontario's economic development authority and the not-for-profit Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine in Toronto to build a $28.3 million center that will provide cell therapy companies with facilities and expertise to help establish manufacturing processes that can produce the large cell numbers required for clinical and commercial use.

Advertised biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector jobs in the job databases tracked by Nature Biotechnology during the first quarter of 2016 are shown in Tables 1 and 2. Other downsizings within the life science industry are shown in Table 3.

Table 1 Who's hiring? Advertised openings at the 25 largest biotech companies

Table 2 Advertised job openings at the ten largest pharma companies

Table 3 Selected biotech and pharma downsizings